Sometimes they really mess things up when there’s little context.
A few basic examples: “file” in English is both a verb and a noun, but other languages have different words for each. The machine translator will just guess at presenting you the noun or verb.
Other languages have genders for everything, so if a computer is male, but a standalone sentence doesn’t know that, the translator has to take a guess. If it guesses wrong, the sentence will be confusing to the user that thinks it’s about something other than a computer.
Reminds me of a mistake in Spanish in a TomTom device I have around: "AP" stands for autopista (motorway) but it reads "AP" aloud as apartado postal (PO box).
A few basic examples: “file” in English is both a verb and a noun, but other languages have different words for each. The machine translator will just guess at presenting you the noun or verb.
Other languages have genders for everything, so if a computer is male, but a standalone sentence doesn’t know that, the translator has to take a guess. If it guesses wrong, the sentence will be confusing to the user that thinks it’s about something other than a computer.
That’s just scratching the surface.