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NEW: @USCIS, the federal agency charged with admitting immigrants, has instructed its officers to use Google Translate and other similar tools to understand refugees' social media posts propublica.org/article/google…
Google Translate and other such machine translation tools routinely struggle to translate idioms, colloquial language and slang. Google has even advised that its tool is not "intended to replace human translators."
But an internal manual shows USCIS told officers vetting refugees that "the most efficient approach to translate foreign language contents is to utilize one of the many free online language translation services provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines." 
It's entirely up to officers, according to the manual, to request in-person translation or not. Here's a link to the manual: documentcloud.org/documents/6427…
One expert called the decision by USCIS to rely on Google Translate "deeply disheartening and stupid and shortsighted." I also talked to foreign-language experts who easily found examples of farcical machine translations of social-media posts. Read more: propublica.org/article/google…
One thing to add - USCIS' own reviews of its pilot social media programs have found that machine translation isn't up to the task. These documents were revealed by the Daily Beast in 2018 documentcloud.org/documents/4341…
