Hey, nice to know that there's a comrade in arms
Yeah, I'm trudging through the text sentence by sentence in places, it feels so... alien at times, compared to normal reading.
Personally, I'm using JWPce, which has an inbuilt Japanese-English dictionary, to transcribe the text and do preliminary look-ups for the meanings of kanji compounds and connectives. For things I'm not sure about, e.g. the definitions in JWPce are vague, or they seem to run counter to what I've picked up from watching anime, I go to WWWJDIC and Yahoo!辞書 to look them up furthur and see usage examples. For grammar, I mainly learned it through
Tae Kim's guide. It's also very handy as a reference, since the table of contents lists the hiragana suffixes of many of the grammars covered.
I wouldn't recommend using machine translation as a base, since it can influence your parsing of a sentence (and often in the wrong way). I'd say try to do what you can from scratch, and maybe use Babylon as a fallback. As for using my translation as a check, apply large and many grains of salt. Even after review, there may still be errors floating around. I've tried to keep the translation literal, but there are parts which I've had to restructure and change the interpretation to keep the English smooth. Feel free to ask anything in the Discussion Page itself, in fact I was hoping to run the whole thing like a discussion.