Globalization has resulted in internationalization of written discourse and consequently a growing need for translating services. Due to his competencies, a translator is irreplaceable. However, since short deadlines are significant factors in translating, the use of information and communication technologies is of utmost importance and provides a considerable support thus speeding up the process of translation. The paper starts with defining a machine translation terminology and pointing to the importance of automizing the translation process. The most important characteristics of machine translation are elaborated on followed by a short developmental overview of machine translation. For the purpose of this paper, three free tools for machine translation, namely Google Translate, Bing Translator and Yandex Translate are selected. The tools are used to translate three types of papers – an original research paper, a popular-scientific paper and a newspaper article. All three papers deal with issues in the field of computer science. Using a simple random sampling method, 15 sentences were selected to be analyzed on a morphological, syntactical, semantical and lexical level. The results point to Google Translate being the most efficient machine translation tool and the best translated text is the original scientific paper. The latter result may be explained with a typical scientific linguistic expression containing fewer phrasal verbs, collocations and idiomatic structures all of which are challenging and problematic for translation. To paraphrase, one needs to consider the context of such sentences and demonstrate more than solely the knowledge of two languages, i.e. one needs to acquire encyclopedic knowledge, which tools for machine translation are unable to gain.