[aeflash]

I think Swedish to English is pretty easy to do automatically to some satisfaction -- there are a lot of similarities in grammar and most words have direct translations. Chinese to English or Japanese to English with that level of clarity would be much more impressive.

[_delirium]

The short sentences and relatively simple grammar also remove a lot of the common sources of intelligibility-threatening Google Translate errors. With German->English the most common serious error I find is that it'll unwind a compound sentence the wrong way: matches up verbs with the wrong clauses, orders clauses in an order that ends up nonsensical in English, etc. Scandinavian languages don't tend to use complex, multi-clause sentence constructions, so there's less opportunity to completely screw up the structure.

[thaumasiotes]

Google translate is completely worthless between chinese and english (either direction). I'm baffled every time I see people praising it.