If the text is very straightforward and you just want to know the gist of the content, machine translation may work for you sometimes. But don’t ever rely on a machine translation program totally as the subtleties and complexities of language will certainly defeat it.

Traditionally these types of programs don’t produce the accurate result you might be expecting, but they do sometimes produce amusing results!
Never, ever risk using them for promotional material …

Here are a couple of amusing (but worrying!) examples of how machine translation can get it wrong, even with quite simple phrases.

Italian to English - The meaning of the original Italian was “vibrant colour pencils”. A program came up with “vibrating colour pencils”!

English to French - A book cover is made of toughened material so that it won’t easily tear. The English description to be translated was “laminated tear-proof material”.

“Tear”, as we know, has two meanings in English:

a) Tear = rip
b) Tear = the tear you cry, tear drops, etc.

Unfortunately the translation software program went for option b) – a literal translation and failure to pick up on context.