That article pretty much sums up what my sister in law (runs a professional translation business) says.

To me, someone who doesn't have a second language strong enough to verify the accuracy of translation, I simply run things through google translate, to the target language and then run the output back to English. Its the translation equivalent of the game of telephone.

Take "the fat cat sat on the mat"):

"the big cat was sitting on the carpet" or "The cats of oil sat on the bed"

and lots of other things which are just odd..