Translation quality is likely to be higher if you specify what domain you are in. i,e finance, manufacturer etc. Translation can make better guesses using that kind of context. Microsoft translator which is the engine behind Bing does have that capability but it's turned off for SharePoint. There is one roundabout way of getting that back if you have tens of thousands of pages then you can use the translator hub and you can feed it your tens of thousands of correct documents which generates a unique language ID and SharePoint is able to use the statistics based on your own document collection in order to fine tune its' translations. It is a lot of work and you require enormous amours of data, the capability is there but it's just turned off.
There are lots of mislabeled features of machine translation service which are by and large turned off but there is an interesting insight into what future versions might have so if you want to do that you can't really do it yourself, you need someone to help you with it who knows what parameters to change and it is quite arduous but it's possible.
Machine translation is not to be relied on for its final accuracy. Things happen when it comes to machines and you will have to spend some money one way or another editing the translations that come back with the free service. You would have to figure out what is the cost of the editing and the cost of getting it translated in the first place. The quality difference must be worthwhile and the cost difference is not very big. Evaluate what is an appropriate strategy in terms of cost, quality and risk.
It may be appropriate to start with the automatic translation so that theres something there initially but use it as a basis for human translation.
It varies from country to country, Canada Belgium Switzerland are places where even a bad translation is not going to be accepted or tolerated. There are other countries which do tolerate poor quality translations if it is temporary. It is a matter of judgement to determine the consequences and risk of errors.
There's been post editing where you give your translator something which is pre translated and see whether that improves translators productivity. It can improve it but it can also reduce translators productivity.
If you send them something, their tools are much better than Bing if you let them decide when or when not to machine translation and use their own tools. You may not be saving them any time, sometimes you are, sometimes you're not. Translation tools that professionals have are paid tools, there are certain proprietary algorithms that they will use. The other thing you can do to increase machine translation quality is to change the way you original write your text.
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