Well, I suppose that it is difficult to leave to a machine translation system a text, as every word and expression has far too many meanings and uses. As Elena suggested, just try to turn the text back to English, I think that you are in for a big surprise. ;-)
A program cannot walk the fine line (even we can't, most of the time, without having dictionaries all over the screen and scattered around the place) between choosing the words that one should remove, and the words to add, in order to convert the meaning of the text as close to the original as possible.
I tried once, just for the fun of it, to translate a page from Bram Stoker's Dracula using, I think, it was the
www.altavista.com/babelfish that did the crime. It really wasn't fun at all. Well, the result made me swear that I would never ever try to do it again on a book that I loved! ;-)
The only use, that there is for machine translation systems, is to find something that you need, in a fast and dirty way, and nothing more. In my case I wanted sometime ago a fast translation from a french gaming site and the MTS gave me what I needed (with half the words in french as untranslatable).
I am not the proper person to answer that (you 'll probably need a linquist for that), but I suppose that there should be multiple templates of expression in every language for the MTS, and then there should be a second pass according to genders used, a third pass to retouch the expression a few more times in order to combine words (in English there are words that in Greek can be translated as a single word, and the opposite), to remove others (a, an and so on which in greek are uncalled for) where it is unneeded and/or garble the sentence and so on. :-)