Scott Spires, the lakefront linguist, has an insightful essay about machine translation on his blog:
The term “idiot savant” appears to have fallen into disuse. Perhaps it’s considered insensitive nowadays, or simply inaccurate. However, if one goes back to the root meaning of the Greek word idiotes – a private person, taking no interest in public affairs – it may apply to machine translation.
MT is an idiot savant in the sense that it can do very complex, large-scale tasks in a flash, but has no sense of context, the development of life, or the outside world. It’s a powerful computing brain, but it can’t think, properly speaking – it can only fulfill a range of programmed tasks.