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In the last 60 years, automated language technologies have very often been mocked and derided. Recently, however, they have begun to take off and are coming into widespread use, at least for the most common language pairs. This article reports on the state-of-the-art of automated translation, investigates the issues and describes the geo-linguistic imbalance characterizing the field. We then analyze the case of the Romance languages in particular. Although the Latin countries joined the technological race at a fairly early stage, their systems focused mainly on translating from and into English. They are now beginning to develop tools for translating between Romance languages, drawing on their linguistic proximity, but there are still a great many hurdles to overcome before each of these languages can be effectively processed.