Maybe we will be content to have "good enough," but I'd think that there is enough value in good quality translation that Google and others will pay people to "train" their algorithms and data set. Instead of waiting till someone tediously translates things, and then trying to learn from it, it would have skilled translators skim over the output, and correct it where it deviates from perfection, while providing concise feedback as to how it got things wrong, how bad it is, why it is wrong, etc. Which is one example of the type of skilled job that I see opening up in the future....the training (not "programming" per se) of robots.
The same thing can happen for, say, training a self driving car how to merge. A good driver can let the car attempt it itself, but slap it into manual when it is failing, then provide some sort of additional feedback -- not so different than a driving instructor teaching a kid to drive.
As robots do more and more things, there will be more and more opportunities for people to train them.
The only scenario where the economics of that doesn't work out is if everyone is employed so they can't afford to pay the trainers enough....but the rest of the article doesn't support that.
You're assuming there is a single perfect translation, or even a single perfect translation algorithm across all domains. I'd wager that translating legalese and translating prose will need completely different algorithms trained on them and in the latter case you won't find two translators that fully agree on the best way to translate a given text.
The same thing can happen for, say, training a self driving car how to merge. A good driver can let the car attempt it itself, but slap it into manual when it is failing, then provide some sort of additional feedback -- not so different than a driving instructor teaching a kid to drive.
As robots do more and more things, there will be more and more opportunities for people to train them.
The only scenario where the economics of that doesn't work out is if everyone is employed so they can't afford to pay the trainers enough....but the rest of the article doesn't support that.