Well I didn't say it's easy (at least to me, I have zero education in machine translation) but some people spend their entire lives working on it(using our tax money) and just don't feel the need to make something public facing out of their projects except dumping the zipped source code on sourceforge.

P.S. And by the way I tried not to use the google api (well before the announcement) and wrote a basic word by word translation which obviously gives dismal results (https://github.com/aparij/bl)