I was just reading the following article from One Year In Mexico {Click Here} about driving in Mexico and the following phrase was the spark for this post -
"Get a Guia Roji, the best road map for Mexico, a Mexican chip for a Garmin GPS (sometimes helpful, sometimes woefully inaccurate) and plan your trip carefully."
I frequently use an online translator whenever I need to write something in Spanish, and when I am trying to get a better understanding of something I am trying to read in Spanish. And like the Garman GPS Mexico Chip, most all translators are woefully inaccurate.
It's like Scrabble, or a crossword puzzle, you have to know enough Spanish to be able to use a Translator to pick out the glaring errors.
Take the following example:
in English - she went out back to pick cherries
Google Translate - salió de nuevo a recoger cerezas
Bing Translator - ella salió de atrás para recoger cerezas
BabelFish Translator - ella salió de nuevo a cerezas de la selección
each has both accuracies and inaccuracies
salió is the correct word for this phrase
including the ella is also accurate to imply she is the one that went
de nuevo means again which confuses me, unless the translators know that she had already been out back before....
recoger means to gather or harvest and is a good choice, however selección does not fit in this phrasing as it means more like selecting a group or a team.
so you can see in such a simple phrase just how difficult it can be - now just imagine an idiomatic phrase or a technical phrase.
Friends once recounted a story about communicating with an attorney here in Merida while they were in Canada, and they were asking about something that needed to be done this year (en este año), unfortunately they weren't able to make the tilde over the n and asked, the attorney if he was going to be able to submit some paperwork en este ano, (in this anus).
So really, you see, you just need to be careful and know enough Spanish, or any language, to see the most obvious and glaring errors.