Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

I get the impression that machine translation is still one of those cases where the results are highly variable. It's better when languages are more closely related and where they've put more effort into manually tuning the results. So a pair of reasonably closely related languages that get translated between a lot, like English and Spanish, are likely to produce much better results than two languages from different language groups, like English and Japanese, or a rarely translated pair, like Scots and Faroese.