The article discusses the motivations for the development of Amikai's web-based translated chat room application. Like other successful Machine Translation (MT) systems, Amikai's translated chat attempts to reconcile overly-optimistic user expectations with the limited capabilities of current MT technology by adjusting user expectations and limiting the scope and domain of the translation task. It is explained why chat is a natural application for MT technology and briefly describe aspects of the user experience within the Amikai system.