Microsoft just added a new translation service under Live that looks interesting according to Google Operating System in Microsoft Launches Translation Service.

".."Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."

I'm more interested in the the way the tool works than Google's translation services as I've always wanted to read certain French Texts and I can't read a word of French at all.

It's always best to look at a tool for what it can do for you – what need does it fulfill – how can it fit into something you already want to do.  In that sense, the Microsoft Windows Live Translator Beta is superior, already, to what Google or anyone else has because it lets you compare text and even passages in text between the original and translated text.