Why I don't trust machine translations
As we say in my country:
Una imagen vale más que mil palabras.
10 Answers
Guillermo:
My first try with a whole sentence in Google Translate:
(I didn't have to make a whole bunch of different attempts to "get it to work.")
My printer has a paper jam.
Mi impresora tiene un atasco de papel.
Look better? 
A machine translator is just a tool. One has to know how to use it, what it is capable of, and what it is no good for. I'm pretty sure that your Spanish and English are at a level where a machine translator is probably of minimal, if any value, to you. Maybe if you tried to learn German it would be valuable to you. (assuming you aren't fluent in German as well) But you get my drift?
I, on the other hand, frequently benefit from the use of Google Translate. By using it I have become familiar with its strengths and weaknesses and when to use it and when not to. And when I do use it I have learned many techniques to help it along. We work as a team.
I also realize that it can be a crutch and an impediment to learning if used the wrong way. For example, I almost never type English into it to get the Spanish. I type Spanish and then check if the English makes sense.
By the way, I thought the picture was pretty funny.
I think that DilKen is correct but never mind whether machine translations are
correct or not you would be hard pressed to get a perfect translation between
people in the same language group, take for instance translating between
Indian English , Australian New Zealand and some English dialects you would
be up a creek without a paddle mate not even knowing if it was
ridgy didge or even fair dinkum, don't get me wrong I don't mean a dead set
true blue dyed-in-the wool Ocker like strine speaker but just your ordinary dag,
So fair suck of the sav mate don't come the raw prawn, machine translators are
better than sliced bread in some circumstances. Avagdweegendmate
Si crees que los traductores electrónicos de inglés a español son terribles, todavía no has visto los de inglés a otras lenguas. Se han gastado lo más dinero con los de español así que los otros deben ser aún peores.
(Pero sí que los de español no son exactamente recomendables)
Machine translators are far from perfect. They are quite bad at complex grammar and depending on the language, and how much investment has been made, they can be pretty bad with idioms.
However, their one big advantage is that they are cheap (zero incremental cost to someone who already has a computer and an internet connection) and they are fast.
If someone thinks they are useless, I encourage them to try a little test. Find a wikipedia page in your native tongue about a familiar topic. Click on a foreign language on the left hand side. Polish, Italian, Russian...whatever. Try to read the article in the foreign language. How much did you understand? Not much?
Now, copy and paste the entire article into Google Translate and have it translated into your mother tongue. Now how much do you understand? Quite a bit, I'd bet. Sure, some words will obviously be wrong, but now, if you need to understand the passage better you can easily find the foreign words which were mistranslated and go to a bilingual dictionary and look them up. (The first step can be to use Google Translate options for words that were mistranslated.) By following this process you can usually get a fairly good idea of what was written in a small fraction of the time that it would have taken to look up every single word in the bilingual dictionary and try to translate from scratch.
Again, they are not perfect, but they can provide value at a low cost. If you need a perfect translation you can hire a translator, pay a few hundred dollars and get a very good translation, assuming the translator is completely bilingual and understands all of the technical jargon in the article...and it could take days. If a cursory understanding of the material is all that you need, then the machine translator can do it in seconds for free and by spending just an hour or so looking up a few words you will probably understand almost all of it.
Ha ha! Many years ago one of our sons used a machine translation to write a Spanish language version of Johnny Appleseed, a common children's story in the US. In the story Johnny Appleseed runs a plant nursery and decides to go west and plant apple trees.
My son asked me to proofread the text. Ha ha! What a bunch of nonsense! According to the machine translation, Johnny Appleseed ran a day care center and planted hairbrushes of apples in the west of the US!
Needless to say, he learned the shortcomings of machine translation.
Now maybe Google translate is not as dumb as we think it is:
This was supposed to be a funny post and not a debate about machine translators. I guess I still don't get the different cultures sense of humor. I said I don't trust, not never use one. Maybe I should have explained it a little more. My bad. - Guillermo
That's what I thought...just funny, not worth a discussion at how good or bad translators are.
Actually, I am pretty sure that many of the idiotic translations in bosque's thread about "signs badly translated" were based on machine translations. Quite a popular thread as everybody thinks the signs are funny.
I thought the same about this thread. Must be a cultural thing...Australia is different 
La mermelada de papel debe ser riquísima.
Lo mismo que el guiso de dulce de leche, el helado de chimichurri , el bombón de mondongo y las papas con chantilly.
Mira que son burras estas máquinas traductoras!
Saludos
Guillermo & Heidita:
I realize that Guillermo was trying to be funny. That's why I said at the bottom of my post:
By the way, I thought the picture was pretty funny.
If I could do my post over (I know I could edit it now, but I don't want to) I probably should have started off with the following preamble.
Guillermo, I realize you may just be making a joke, but there really are some people who believe that machine translators are useless. I want explain why I disagree with that notion and hopefully open some minds to their value, so they might consider using one for their benefit. Please don't take anything I say personally, I have no idea what your true overall opinion of machine translators is. This is intended for the broader community here. I also encourage opposing viewpoints on what I am about to say.
But that would have been way too politically correct for my taste, so I just did it the way I did it.
¡Jua! "Paper jam"="Mermelada de papel". A ver como sale "Preservativo de papel". Ni lo voy a buscar.
Éste es un tío que entra en una botica y le dice al 'fármaco, «Señor, quiero un profiláctico.»
El botiquero, sin inmutarse le dice al cliente, «Señor, dígalo 'condón.»
Y el otro responde, «Está bien. Que me dé un don profiláctico.»
