Hi there,
There was a post on translation of tables in Content Translation, it doesn't seem to do it. My GoogleTrans gadget does this quite successfully. You guys can look at the code to see how it is done. Basically a recursive procedure parses the HTML of the selected text and then a list of text elements is assembled. The call to Google is made with every text element being a q= parameter and the resulting return call has enough detail to place the translation text elements within the original text elements. It's not that hard for good programmers.
Translation of table is good use of machine translation, because there can be hundreds of elements that you have to translate by hand, and often the table elements are quite easy to translate. I first did this for French to English track articles, and the Google translation properly translated the event names, the dates, and the towns the events took place in. For town names, for instance, it actually takes an expert translator to properly translate Polish town names in English for instance.
Thanks for replying to my posts. I do think that machine translation is possible and useful for translation of simple elements in HTML tables.