Rewriting Articles

While talking with my roommate about ways to rewrite articles, we came across an interesting idea: use one of the online translators to translate an article into another language, and then translate it back to english.

As a test I created a couple subsites on a new domain to see how they'd perform. As I made the sites about 2 weeks ago it's too early to tell however there are a couple things I'd like to discern.

1) I'm pretty sure they'll be no duplicate content penalty however since the resulting article is only marginally good (and sometimes outright unreadable) I want to get an idea of what the user will do when faced with this text: click or back?

2) While I made sure to keep the main keyword in the article I wonder if the translated article will on subject enough for the contextual aspect of the ad system to work effectively (i.e. will the clicks pay?).

I'll be keeping an eye on this one over the next 4-6 weeks to see how it works out while I look for other ways to rewrite articles. I think synonym replacement will be the next step.