Just wondering??

I hear all the time about Google translations are terrible and see examples of it when I hit the translate button on Facebook for example. I can usually figure out the meaning when it translates it to hammered English. I wondered if it was just as bad when you translate English to non-English. For example something I write on Facebook in English and the person hits translate to Japanese , is it so bad the meaning is lost or can the person make it out OK ?

On topic: this will depend on the complexity of the translated text. How about we try it out? Have a random post autotranslated (not necessarily one of your own) and place the result here so people can try to read it.

I tried a simple example sentence out of interest: "I saw a wild elephant running through the streets today." This got translated to 「今日は通りを実行している野生の象を見た。」, which is perfectly valid - apart from the 実行, which is "run" as in "run a program". The typical kind of mistake that comes out of a machine translation. But if the reader ignores this word (as it doesn't make sense in the context), there are only so many things left that a wild elephant can do in a street, so they can make a safe guess at the meaning.