Google do have a preannounced path throught deprecation to termination and they claim [w]herever possible, the documentation includes suggested alternatives designed to help you achieve similar functionality — whether it’s a new version or related offering.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-s...

In the case of the translation APIs, they were clearly broken and facilitated content spamming, and the replacement APIs appear to be serviceable.

There is no "replacement API" for Google translate.

I thought they announced that they were going to launch a paid Translate api?

Esrauch is right — but they have not announced details.

That is right, at least not yet. I have a vague recollection of reading some details of how the substitute API would work, but that must be spurious since Google have officially left the matter open to now.

You mean no google replacement translation API? What about bing or mygengo or wordlingo?