It maybe that I am good at gussing when someone uses a translation site. Or it maybe that I have used enough sites to know the common mistakes or when one site simply is poorly funcitioning. I am not sure if my ability to scan and realize the words that came out poorly translated is by seeing the mistakes the translation website makes over and over or if it is from using them myself. But, everytime I ask someone if they used a translator for a specific part the answer is always "yes". Why is that? Because some translators are not as well created as others.
www.freetranslation.com
This website is handy if you're in a fix, but it's not the best out there for several reasons. It doesn't have any user interaction. You can't distinguish between several different types of meaning to get different words. Often it just will guess and see what happens. If you mis-spell or type another (or leave out an accent mark) the translation will not occur. Not only is this unhelpful it is frustating. Thus, the user ends up with a choppy mess of words that mean different things for different situations than the user intends and will repeat the mistake in the future not realizing the website's error. A professional translation costs to be completed and with the service given by free use I would be wary of waiting on a timely and costly translation. Although, this seems to be the only way to get an accurate translation from this site.
Other sites offer multipule meanings, spelling help, and link you to other words you may want to use. If you're using a translation website I would not recommend Free Translation.
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Freetranslation really is a poor translator as far as web-based translation goes. You do bring up an interesting point when you speak about seeing translation from poor translators in writing. It is blatantly obvious, not only because the word is usually incorrect, but it is not in the same voice as the author. I hold this idea that language acquisition is more about hands on experience, and not on accuracy of word-by-word translation. Everything is relative to the idioms of their language.
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