And they have been very helpful and I have learned a great deal!
One thing I would recommend is to do it one sentence at a time. I've found that the online translators, especially Excite.co.jp when it sees elipses or other than periods and commas, often ignore punctuation and try to take cues from subsequent sentences, jumbling up things even worse in the process. Look at more than one sentence at a time may help
you figure it out, but it doesn't help the translatorbot.
A second thing is to compare different translators (babelfish is next to useless with Japanese, but on rare occasions it comes through when the others can't). I also sometimes am able to parse sentences out by using Google, since it has instant translation as you make changes to the text. So if it's giving me something utterly incomprehensible, if I put phrases on different lines, sometimes it helps it to know where to break the character string into words and return something that does make sense. Because it's instant, it's easier to play around with than the others. However, recently Google has become incapable of handling numbers at all, invariably reversing them, or shuffling them if there are more than two.
There are some other tricks to bending the translators to your will (and learning why a sentence says what it says), but unless you're planning to do this a lot, it may not be worth your time to learn them.
