Using machine translation

When you are writing English, you may want to use one of the free machine translation services. These can be useful tools, but you should make sure that you use them in a sensible way. Here are some ideas and guidelines:

1. Your purpose should be to improve your English, not just to create a lot of English sentences quickly.
2. If you input a lot of Japanese and then just click translate and paste the result, the translation will be very bad and usually not understandable. Usually it will be very clear to everyone that you did not write the sentences yourself.
3. Although it takes longer, one sentence at a time is best. (In any case, you shouldn't be doing this for many sentences.) Look at the sentence: can you understand it? Does it have a verb and subject? From your knowledge of English, does it feel right?
It's probably better to retype the sentence rather than copy and paste.
4. It's necessary to rewrite your Japanese in an English way, e.g.
昨日映画見た。　>>
昨日私が映画を見た。

Here are some translation and similar sites:

Excite
Yahoo
BabelFish

WWWJDIC
rikai

These last 2 are different from the others. They translate the WORDS and phrases in a text. This is much faster than a dictionary because all the words are translated at the same time. WWWJDIC is especially useful, I think, for study. But you have to decide how to put the words together into sentences, an essential practice for improving your English.

Why don't you try the 3 translation services above and compare them? Also, please report if you find any other services!