Freelancers really do need to be aware that using “cloud computing” services of any type, whether Google Docs or the Web version of MS Office, to say nothing of online translation memories, exposes them to liability if they disclose confidential information or information subject to an NDA. Almost all clients regard the translations as their property, not the freelancer’s, so you have to treat it as such. Freelancers really have no business using Google Translator Toolkit except for translations they are 100% sure do not fall under an NDA.

Thanks for pointing out this information (link).

I notice that Google itself doesn’t promise not to data mine your “private” TMs, so this would still seem to run afoul of most NDAs I’ve signed.

I do think this will be great for things like Wikipedia and open-source software, however, as well as creative-commons books. For example, I know there’s a lot of interest in getting some of the Japanese-language ruby books translated into English. Doing this through GTT would make it a lot easier.

By default, we save your translations to a shared, publicly searchable translation memory.

Some translators, may not want to save their translations to a publicly searchable translation memory. In such cases, you can associate a translation memory with a translation by…

Note that custom translation memories are not supported for Wikipedia and Knol. Since content in those sites are meant to be shared and published, translators can only save Wikipedia and Knol translations to our global, shared TM.

So it seems you could use a “custom” TM if you trust Google’s privacy arrangement (not having to back up TMs would be tempting).
But I think this Toolkit is a great thing for Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how or if it affects the correlation between same-topic articles in English and Japanese. When the Toolkit gets around to supporting Japanese into English translation, I’d possibly do some Wikipedia translations for fun now and then on topics I’m interested in such as Japanese movies, novels, history, sports etc.

I may be wrong: I checked it out once, out of curiosity, but haven’t used it yet.