I think you would enjoy the conversation about “Blind idiot translations”. It is pertinent since it involves both machine translation and translations by idiotic subbers who think like machines, putting their grey matter in a closet with naphthaline. Contributors to the discussion (including @lutra) made some hilarious examples.
Excerpt from tvtropes.org, a really funny and interesting website that I recommend:
A “Blind Idiot” Translation is a translation from one language to another where the translation is overly literal, grammatically incorrect, very awkward, or clearly misses what the word or phrase was supposed to mean. If a translation is complete gibberish, it is a Translation Train Wreck. Sometimes overlaps with Gratuitous Foreign Language.
Actually “blind idiot” translation is another thing.
The name is not intended to be an insult against the translator (although it works just as well that way), hence the quotation marks: “blind idiot” is a Recursive Translation of the old saying “out of sight, out of mind”. A computer in a lab was running a beta of some translation software package and translated “out of sight, out of mind”—meaning “if you hide something, sometimes people forget that it existed in the first place”—into Chinese and back to English, and the printout read “invisible idiot”, which mutated further into “blind idiot”.
So it usually means a back and forth translation English-other language-English by an unskilled person.