They can work reasonably well in restricted contexts - which might well
cover some of the patents. Most of the worst examples are when people feed
them very idiomatic text (exactly the field one of my sons is working in
at the moment.)
A better approach might be to publish them in original language on CD-ROM
with software that would allow multilingual searches - or even carry them
out automatically - so that if you searched for a term in English it
could use simple dictionary lookup to suggest equivalent French and German
terms and search for these also. Then those who wanted to translate them
could do so.
When I was researching I also had to deal with Russian and Japanese
articles. Although I don't read either I could tell whether it was worth
taking them to someone who did from the diagrams and formulae.
Peter Marshall
On Fixing Shadows and elsewhere:
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ds8s
Family Pictures, German Indications, London demonstrations &
The Buildings of London etc: http://www.spelthorne.ac.uk/pm/