Great, I spend years building a journalism niche and now this...

Now I'll actually have to provide quality writing or something.

The translations are about six levels below BAD Chinglish.

I don't think it's supposed to translate the results accurately: it is supposed to translate the search term into Chinese, and then search. You still need to read Chinese to make real sense of the results. No?

@clb - MT is a non-trivial problem and the accuracy of various systems can be easily compared. Translation and search quality in English in this system vary depending on the field being searched and the breadth of the backend database. A search for "China Mobile" will return more intelligible translations than one for "shiny happy people". A modified version of the Adso system is powering the backend. Its database is open to user contributions so the best way to improve translation quality is simply to teach the system keywords it does not currently recognize.

@don - The backend handles bilingual segmentation and indexing. So it does not simply translate phrases and then submit them to a search engine. The idea is that searches for "Coca Cola" and 可口可乐 should return identical results. Titles are gist translated, and a link is provided to a full-text gist translation using the Google servers.