That was PERFECT advice! I do this a lot in communicating with my German and Spanish speaking friends. If you write in simple sentences, and try to 'think' like the recipient, you get an excellent product from Google Translate. And yes, copy and paste the finished translation and reverse it. Have it to translate from the foreign language back into English. Sometimes you will see how wacky your phraseology is and you need to simplify it even more

He should be able to easily do that. And when anyone in Italy reads it, they will most certainly understand the difficulty he is having trying to communicate and will probably answer back in English. Most Europeans speak English also.
Mike in Kentucky