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Google translate is useful for getting the gist of news articles in languages I don't read (which is pretty much all of them); it's useless for nuances.
It might be a boon to book translators, in being able to do the bulk of the translating poorly-but-quickly, and then needing extensive proofing & cleanup. Just like even bad OCR followed by proofing is faster than typing an entire book, the auto-translate may speed up the translation process.
I think Google translate is much, much less of a threat to publishers than TTS is to audiobooks. TTS may be flat, but at least it gets most of the words right. The story is still all there. Google translate is unpleasant for news, useless for literature, and hilarious for song lyrics and poetry.
One of the blog-based meme-games that goes around sometimes is "Pick a verse of a song you like. Throw it in Google translate 3 times: English to Japanese, Japanese to Russian; Russian back to English. Post the results, and see if anyone recognizes the song." The number of steps & suggested languages vary; generally, people identify the songs by a keyword or two in the chorus. The meaning is often shifted around, and the emotional impact is entirely lost in the scrambled rephrasings.
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