ok at German but useless at Italian and Spanish

I have found Google's translator ok at German but useless at Italian and Spanish.

The obvious problem is that (the gender of) the subject pronoun of a verb is omitted in these two languages (whilst that of inanimate nouns and adjectives is stated repeatedly, eg "lA miA cartA bancariA e` arrivatA"). Less clealy explicable is that Google doesn't understand the use of impersonal pronouns, eg "se puede hablar Espanol" ("you can speak Spanish", but literally, "it can speak itself Spanish").

My Italian teacher once set us a passage from Italo Calvino, whose vocabulary is enormous, even though he came from Argentina. In order to avoid spending several hours turning over the pages of the dictionary, and knowing that Google couldn't actually render it into English, I looked up the passage on the web and fed it to the translator. I still had to look up a couple of hundred words!

On the other hand, just try reading something in Japanese without it!