It might sound a bit ironic, but I recently realized that the higher your language skills, the better you will be able to use online translation. It’s obvious that you need machine translation more when your language skills are not good enough, but the thing is, if you are not so knowledgeable about the language, you wouldn’t even know how to use the tool more effectively.
When you have a deeper understanding of the structural differences between the two languages, it will be much easier to use the translator, and you can take more advantage of it.
Taking English and Japanese as examples, the subject tends to be omitted in Japanese. And so, you should add the subject to a Japanese sentence intentionally when translating it into English sentence, even if it sounds very unnatural, so that the translated English will be more correct and makes more sense.
Isn’t it ironic that online translation, which people who are not good at foreign languages really need, cannot be used well without knowledge of foreign languages?
Interesting observation. I think this is more relevant to languages from different language families like your example of English and Japanese though. Since languages from the same language families often have similar structure or words. I have even heard how sometimes people will still understand each other even if they are speaking different languages if the languages are similar enough. For example a Portuguese speaker may still follow along with a Spanish conversation. They may not understand everything but understand the general sense.
I am not sure whether it acceptable or desirable to correct posted material. I thought that was desirable and thus I am doing so as I would want to be corrected in the languages I am learning (Spanish and Russian). In the above post, "machine translation" is an awkward phrase that is not used. Better to use "online translation" if you are referring to the various services on the internet. "hot" should be "how" (which I assume is a typographical error since the meanings are very different). "stractual" should be "structural."
Regarding the use of online translations, you raise some interesting points. I am reading the book in Spanish which I know fairly well but still look up about 3 words per page. I am reading it on a Kindle and have discovered that when I highlight a word that I don't know, a dictionary translation appears in Spanish which is really helpful. Sometimes I try to figure out what the English translation would be from the description in Spanish. If the word is an adjective and the definition is just the verb form, this is not enough for me to know the meaning. However, there is a "read more" link which provides more uses of the word which generally helps. For example, I may know one meaning of the word but not how it is used in the present context. Thus, the added usages are helpful. However, I generally write as a yellow "note" what the word is in English (my native language). Thus, reading the book on Kindle has been more helpful than reading a hard copy of the book because of the built-in link to the Spanish dictionary. I don't know how this works with other languages.
Your comment about how translations must make something understood in the other (not original) language is a common issue that professional translators face because a word-for- word translation frequently is not adequate. In Spanish, I have found that words that have several meanings in the Spanish dictionary cannot be properly conveyed by a single word in English. That is, sometimes there are shades of meaning -- whether positive, negative or neutral -- that appear in one language and not in the other and the context must be used to determine what is fitting in that context. I don't know Japanese but your comment about inserting the subject or a personal pronoun to clarify what would make sense in English is totally understandable.
Spanish uses formal and informal forms of "you" and both in singular and plural forms which do not exist in English so there have been several discussions online about how more text needs to be added to convey the social etiquette of the terms of address between the various characters in the book.
By the way, I am enjoying the book tremendously. The first hundred pages or so were intriguing but after that, my desire to find out what happens next has increased greatly! (I don't want to reveal anything about the plot in case anyone hasn't gotten that far.) In English we say it's a real "page-turner" -- meaning it is so exciting that you want to turn the pages quickly to find out what happens. Enjoy!