He was less than half joking. I can only hope that his children do well in their Mandarin Chinese and Hindi lessons at school. Machine Translation, An Introductory Guide - D. Arnold, L. Balkan, R. Lee Humphreys, S. Meijer, L. Sadler. At least not for translating any kind of text covering any kind of topic. A machine must first know what kind of topic to translate.
Some words have many different meanings, depending on the subject matter.
For example a simple word with three letters like 'bar' can mean a cocktail bar, a handle bar on a bicycle, a space bar on a keyboard, an exercise bar for gymnastics, a sand bar in the ocean, a bar of a popular tune, a bar for lawyers, a salad bar. And the list goes on. A machine can only produce a correct translation when it 'knows' how to select the right bar. Until that happens, machine translation will remain a very primitive type of application for computers. Sure, perfect machine translation is a 'hard' artificial intelligence problem that we're not going to solve any time soon.