Haddad says that machine translation works best for technical documents with text that follows standard English rules, with no ambiguities. You must have a person review and edit the text. If machine translation could improve our efficiency by even a few percent, we would use it. But we don't. That should tell you something.
Machine translations do allow readers to understand the gist of a document.
If you're a developer or a researcher who needs to get an idea of what a document contains, machine translation may fill the bill. It can be also enormously handy for deciphering e-mail in foreign languages. But beware of posting machine-translated text on your site. Still, machine translation may prove useful for some projects. By entering text or a URL in the online text area, a translation is provided in a number of European languages.