It is possible to write software that solves real business problems, cheaply and reliably. The recipe is well known, even though it's not easy to do.
I am a software developer. I'm happy to work as a programmer for ThoughtWorks, mostly in the Milano area. I used to teach at the Università dell'Insubria.
The Google Translate team was actually surprised about the high quality of machine translation for Esperanto. As we know from many experiments, more training data (which in our case means more existing translations) tends to yield better translations. For Esperanto, the number of existing translations is comparatively small. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100 times the data; other languages on which we focus our research efforts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’t achieve comparable quality yet. Esperanto was constructed such that it is easy to learn for humans, and this seems to help automatic translation as well.
http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2012/02/tutmonda-helplingvo-por-ciuj-homoj.html