How Machine Translation Has A Habit Of Mangling Multilingual SEO

Recent discussions force me to return to the subject of translation versus SEO -- particularly machine translation -- as it seems this old topic has not yet gone away. For multinational sites, maintaining your site can be an expensive affair, and the cost savings of machine translation seem outstandingly attractive. But as my mother always says to me, "If something looks too good to be true, it usually is." Machine translation is a good case in point. Often abbreviated to "MT", machine translation involves using computers to do the work which human translators would normally do.