Hector Martin

Casual/slangy Japanese is full of context-sensitive contractions and abbreviations that machine translation has no hope of ever getting right without being actually intelligent.

Ah, so it's like how someone in English might say that something's "The bomb" to say it's awesome, and it getting interpreted into "The explosive device" in a different language then?

Machine learning cannot handle this in all cases. You need hard AI (or better). The kind that could be reasonably said to be conscious and given human rights.

The space of possible language is much, much more vast than the entire body of written human works. Most sentences have never been said before, ever. Therefore, learning from past translations isn't going to give you a solution for new ones. It'll help, but it won't solve it.