rod03801: Well, I can imagine that if you have a text translated from, say, Spanish into Portuguese, you might get some quite meaningful results, in which the target text corresponds to a large extent to the source text.

You say you can get a decent idea of what is being said. Well, how do you know? The text provided by the translator might make some sense to you, but if you don't know the language, you can never tell if what you think is being said really matches what is actually being said. Let me give you an example. A Czech sentence "Dáme to dohromady?" generally means "Wanna date me?" However, Google Translator translates it as "Put it together?" Now there you can see that the machine-translated text does not precisely mean what the original Czech sentence does. :)

If you want to understand a foreign language, you have to start learning it.