There is more and more talk about MT (machine translation) these days among translators. I've heard a lot of arguments on the pros and cons of MT, but typical of the even-handedness with which translators--who, after all, are mediators by nature--tend to discuss issues, these arguments are usually very objective. Me, I get a singularly subjective rash and feel my blood pressure climb every time anybody talks about letting a machine translate for them, especially when the text involved is anything even vaguely "literary." Call me old fashioned, but I consider translating a form of writing and I consider writing, at its most mundane, a craft and, at its most sublime, an art. Hence, any suggestion that I, as a translator, could use an MT program to translate a poem or a short story, is tantamount to saying that Neruda or Hemingway could have used a machine writing program to create the originals. And that is simply ludicrous.
Am I saying that there will never be a machine that can write a book? No. In fact, machine writing already exists. Perhaps the best example is the brainstorm of a fellow about whom Naom Cohen wrote an article in The New York Times a couple of years ago: namely, Philip M. Parker.