Machine translation and its ability to produce absolute rubbish

International students: Do not be fooled into thinking you can translate your language into English (the Golden Rule of Translation = never try to translate INTO ANY LANGUAGE EXCEPT your mother tongue = your native or first language. Any native speaker supervisor or lecturere (anyone marking your paper) will know... How? because at least 65% of it will be nonsensical.

Just try translating into your language (Chinese especially) something from an English textbook - copy and paste a couple of sentences into yahoo babelfish or similar online translation service.

You will see that the Chinese (or whichever is your language) is full of syntax / grammar and basic meaning errors.
Just a piece of advice... Take it to heart, for free!

Ann, thanks for sharing that. As a monolingual person, I wondered how accurate babelfish was!! Well, it is nice that human translators will probably always be necessary, because language is as complex as we are.