The word "site" in English originally meant "location", "position", or "place", so in, certain contexts, "plaats" is actually a perfectly valid translation!

The "places" you visit with a web browser were originally called "web sites" (i.e., places or locations on the web); this was later shortened to "sites".

The second example uses the longer form, thereby disambiguating the word "site", which leads to a better translation. (If the source text isn't explicit about the type of site, the translation program would have to "know" that you can't take a "screenshot" of a physical location --but that kind of reasoning is still a bit too sophisticated for today's software!)

Your "look for English words remaining in the output and try rephrasing" is a good bit of advice, but beyond that if you're going to rely on machine translation, rely on it once, not twice; fire and forget.

Google translates the first example correct.
I think Google 'knows' the right translation not because it can reason, but because it uses statistics. 'Site' in the proximity of 'screenshot' usually means 'website', not place.

Yes, Google did translate the first example correctly.

However, when I tried: "This plot of land will make a good site for the school" (where site can only mean "location", not "web site"), I got: "Dit perceel zal maken van een goede site voor de school" --so perhaps Google *always* "translates" the word "site" as "site"... ;-)

I do agree with you, though, that Google's "knowledge" is based firmly on statistics! (I did find it interesting that they ask for human feedback through their link, "Suggest a better translation"...)

Google:
steuerspannung -> steuerspannung
steuer spannung -> Tax tension

Altavista Babelfish:
steuerspannung -> control voltage (that's 100%)

The field of Natural Language Processing is one of statistical analysis, since "teaching" a computer grammar is not realistically fesible. That being said, Google's translator would likely have a tremendous corpus at its fingertips for refining its translations; and the bigger the corpus the better.

I have not used Google Translate, but I have used Babelfish, and its results are hit and miss--more so miss. Such web translation programs seem to fair best with Indo-European languages, especially when converting to or from English. I would be very wary of using them for languages which sharply diverge from English grammar (e.g. Japanese or Arabic).

Another nice thing to know about Dutch is that it's not very disturbing to use English words, since we don't have our own terminology for every single word -- that's certainly true when about tech-oriented stuff. Nobody minds, really. One could even go as far (as address a Dutch-speaking person (at random) in English and still be sure he or she would understand you perfectly and would most probably be able to answer you accordingly, without having too much trouble with it. At least that's what it's like over here in Belgium. I think it's because we are used to picking up languages (our national languages are Dutch, French, German and English). Over here, it's compulsory to have mastered all of these languages to a certain extent by the end of high-school.

So in your particular example you could've just answered your addressee in English without being to worried about transferring the message in essence.

For me it's an opportunity to practice, but for anyone who's not interested it's bound to be frustrating!

"Yes. You have my permission to use a screenshot of the site."

~ はい、その サイト の スクリーンショット を 使用して もよい。

"Hai (yes), sono (the) saito (site) no (of) sukuriinshotto (screenshot) o shiyoushite moyoi (use of)."

And that concludes todays Japanese lesson :)