We've recently started a volunteer project of assessing the quality of different online translation services here: www.pclingua.com

This far we've done General News and Soccer topics and assessed Google, Systran, PROMT, WordLingo and a couple of more providers.

Machine translation still has a long way to go.
It just happened that last night I was helping a friend with some translation, and we did some comparisons between Babelfish, and Google translate.
Google seems to be a bit more accurate if you could call it that, but it is definitely far from reliable.
I tried one form of a Portuguese question asking "are you tired", and the English translation came out as a question asking "who are you sleeping with".
For someone trying to maintain a crosscultural long distance relationship, it might be better to stick to using a dictionary, and taking language classes.

Just for the kick of it I tried it out. I had this very article translated into czech. The result was hilarious, couldn't stop laughing. But I guess amusement wasn't Google's aim.

While I admit that your INQ banter isn't the easiest piece of english to translate and czech isn't really simple language either, the czech version was practically unreadable (it might had something to do with tears in my eyes). I just couldn't understand it and had to check (czech?) back to original every now and again just to know what was Google trying to tell me. It was very cryptic indeed.

It might work for someone with a lot of fantasy trying to decipher BBC news. But I woulnd't say the "system is quite good". It's funny but definitely not good or practical.