This is a neat idea. I just rented an apartment in Tokyo. My Japanese is not that great, so when going through the lease, the realtor and I sat down with Google Translate* to go through all the legalese. We had the exact same sort of "wtf?" moments that the author describes -- I can deal with regular conversation, but legal terms oftentimes have odd meanings compared to how regular people talk...

(*actually, it was something else, I don't remember the brand, but exactly the same concept as Google Translate)