Interpreters do it

… in two languages
… with their tongues
… with their mouth open

environmental security

environmental security: seguridad ecológica

See Simon Dalby's book by this name. I'm not sure Simon would include the breaking nuclear disaster but it has me thinking about this again.

no fly zone

no fly zone: zona de exclusión aérea

though this editorial in the Guardian argues that it's a euphemism for war

machine translation

Spanish...¿Cómo como como? Como como como!!

English equivalent...what do you mean how I eat? I eat the way I eat!

Try this with ANY machine and tell me what you get.

(Thanks to Ed Zaldibar for this one)

That said, I had always said before don't bother starting with machine translation and trying to clean it up, it will just get you going down the wrong track - BUT if you do this inside a good translation memory system (I like freetm.com) AND you've got a document with a lot of standard UN terminology, I've found that it CAN save you time looking up names of UN departments, etc. now that all UN translations are in google translate. But then, my poor editor has had to do a lot more clean up for me than normal when I use that crutch so .... I guess I'm still torn.