The problem with modern approaches to machine translation is that they are just good enough to trick monolinguals and some people who know two closely-related languages into thinking that they are ready for use.
My current favorite mistranslation:
Imagine you’re in Sarajevo (Bosnia). Somebody tells you something about a “brzi voz za Slavonski Brod”, which Google dutifully translates for you as “fast train to Liverpool”. Which is interesting, because I never knew that town on the Croatian-Bosnian border shared a name with the more famous English city.
That’s probably because you wrote it in a rough English-based phonetic transcription. If you had used the original script or a the proper scientific transliteration instead, Google Translate would have had no problem.
