The November/07 issue of Info magazine published an article that I was expecting to read some day, because I believe these people weren’t the first and won’t be the last to choose the alternative above.
The article said that the Dutch Government invited a group of Israeli hackers to visit Holland, and this invitation was made through a letter, written in Dutch. Although the hackers didn’t speak Dutch, they were able to understand the whole thing. The problem was when they decided to write the reply in the same language. The hackers wrote a text in English and used the Babelfish website to obtain a Dutch version of the writing. In the automatic system, some words were changed and sentences such as “we’ll be glad if we happen to visit your country” were translated as “we’ll be glad to get to know your mother”. According to Jerusalem Post, the mistake happened because the expression “if” in Hebrew is written like “ha’im,” which is very similar to the word “ha’ima,” for “mother”.
When the letter was received, the Dutch threatened to cancel the invitation and said they were very disappointed at the behavior of the hackers. After a new contact made between members of the two countries’ foreign services, they managed to fix the misunderstanding.
I hope this serves as an example. If you need to translate a text, avoid to use such alternative, for what seems to be a cheap solution, may cost more than you expected. 
