When someone posts to a forum, we store the posting and its original language setting. If someone who speaks a different language reads the post, we automatically call Google translate and display the translated version with the original version. We also cache the translated version so the next time the same thing happens the translation is instantaneous.
A cool idea! Sadly, the first text in his example screenshot shows the limitations of machine translation – the German text makes absolutely no sense :-)
Yeah, monolingual English speakers tend to assume that machine translation works. (Actually, monolinguals in general are prone to this, but English speakers appear to be more rarely confronted with the products of such attempts.)