Actually, google translate is the best academic system there is. They never lost a single nist evaluation (for an example see http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig//tests/mt/2005/doc/mt05eval_... ), as far as I know, and they consistently publish intermediate results and details in their models.
If you go by your logic nobody ever writes software, as most of the building blocks were really invented by other people or adapted from other people's inventions.
If you go by your logic nobody ever writes software, as most of the building blocks were really invented by other people or adapted from other people's inventions.
And I say this as an NLP researcher.