In the case of a bad translation, one tool that can be much more reliable is Linguee. It is comprised of both official dictionary definitions as well as crowdsourced definitions from a variety of sources, particularly professionally translated websites. This can be very useful with natural language phrases (especially colloquial phrases) which are commonly used by native speakers of a language.
As an example, my results for "She owned to having done it." in both engines:
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| Google Translate result is "Sie besaß zu haben es getan.", which refers to having possessed something. |
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| Linguee result is "Sie gestand, es getan zu haben.", showing that the engine understands the other meaning of owned (to confess to). |
Give Linguee a try if you are interested in learning (or just translating) common natural language phrases from one language to another (they support English <-> German, English <-> Spanish, English <-> French, and English <-> Portuguese).
