I think the 55 number came from a machine translation competition a
while back. It's not a very meaningful number by itself, even if we
find out just how it got that score.
How good Google translate is depends on your expectations. It is not
as good as professional translation, or even amateur translation by
someone skilled in both languages - but most of us don't know all the
languages Google Translate does.
As machine translation goes, it's IMO pretty amazing. It can tell that
the John in
> My name is John
should be left untranslated in most languages, but if it is in the
context
> It is written in the Gospel of John
It IS translated, and correctly, too (at least to the languages I
know). Even more amazing, the phrase
> Jeg så en dårlig film i dag, den het "Hjelp, vi flyr"
is perfectly translated to English, with a correct, non-literal
translation of the title.
In general, it seems translations to English are far better than
translations from English, or into anything else. Translations from
French appear to be especially good. It seems:
1. Languages that are close to English translate well into English
(Dutch, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish)
2. Languages with very different syntax from English tend to translate
poorly. Different word order, highly inflective or agglutinative seems
hard for it. But it has definitively become better at agglutination.
Sometimes it comes up with perfectly reasonable translations for word-
parts that aren't even real words!
3. Languages with few speakers seem to do worse: Icelandic and Irish
Gaelic can give pretty weird translations IME.
