It's interesting that all the positive Google Translate experiences shared here have to do with Chinese and Japanese. In general, my experience with translations of European languages has been abysmal, for anything but the simplest expressions. The resulting expressions are often so ungrammatical that they were basically unintelligible.
I remember a Greek taxi driver who picked me up for a long trip, and seeing the distance, initially assumed I was going to the airport - and asked about it, prompting a flurry of No no nos from me and pointing on a map. He later tried to use Google translate to explain why he had assumed this (Greek to English) , but what came out was so garbled I only understood that he was saying something about distance and airport, prompting another confused flurry of map pointing (he abandoned the hope of explaining the initial confusiom and resigned to just driving...) . It was only minutes later, trying to think about what had happened, that I finally puzzled out what that translation must have meant.
For translations where one side is not English, Google Translate does a horrible job, because it will incorrectly translate to English first, then incorrectly translate from English to the target language. This means you end up with translation errors only comprehensible to someone who speaks all three languages!
But even without that, even for what should be simple translations from English to e.g. Swedish, it makes so many nonsensical errors. Not just misunderstanding context, but fabricating novel and absurd translations of common words.
I think it's gotten worse since they switched to their whole-sentence neural net system. At least in the past, the individual words made some sense, and you could click on them individually to see other (sometimes more accurate) alternatives.
I remember a Greek taxi driver who picked me up for a long trip, and seeing the distance, initially assumed I was going to the airport - and asked about it, prompting a flurry of No no nos from me and pointing on a map. He later tried to use Google translate to explain why he had assumed this (Greek to English) , but what came out was so garbled I only understood that he was saying something about distance and airport, prompting another confused flurry of map pointing (he abandoned the hope of explaining the initial confusiom and resigned to just driving...) . It was only minutes later, trying to think about what had happened, that I finally puzzled out what that translation must have meant.