I find automatic translation from English to Portuguese very good, but those are not that different from each other. What is the state of automatic translation between two languages that are very far and different from each other like Chinese (a sino-tibetan language) and English (an indo-european language)? I thought that ML and all the recent research on that could close the gap in this regard even for such very distant languages.
I use it everyday, and actually Japanese to English is pretty good in Google translate. Japanese to French was abysmally bad a few years back, but now it became acceptable.
The opposite translations are not bad per-se, but the sentences are always non-natural because all the context and articles that are implicit in Japanese are kept.
It's a mixed bag really. Japanese is still too foreign for Google Translate to interpret properly outside of common phrases.