Machine Translations - Gift or Curse?

Ok, first of all a disclaimer: I am freelance translator, so my opinion might be biased. On the other hand, I believe that because of my knowledge in this field, I can evaluate the quality of machine translations better than most of those who use them.

First of all: Those free website translating services might be helpful to get an overview of a site's content. But: Those translating services rely on machines. Now answer this for yourself: Do you really believe that a machine can grasp the meaning and intention of a text?

Machine translations only replace the words and sentences in one language with matching words and sentences in another language. Now if you have ever had a look into a dictionary, you know that many words have more than one meaning. Machine translations might be getting better, but I don't see them reaching a quality anywhere near a good human translator in the near future. Machines lack one important thing: They can't think!

So do I recommend or warn against machine translations?

Both.

Let me explain how I mean this: If you only need a general overview, want to read someone's blog or translate something for fun or to use for your friends only, machine translations are just fine. You only have to keep in mind that it isn't an accurate translation, and you should be prepared for weird sentences and portions which just don't make sense.

As soon as you need some information for relevant purposes, though, such as for business or legal matters, you should never relay on machine translations. In the best case, they will make sense for you, but in worst case, they will display information wrongly (apart from not making any sense at all). So in those cases, you are well advised to pay a human translator for his services as a bad translation can cost you much more retrospectively than a quality translation.