Yeah; I was far less impressed when I saw the languages in question when I ran across this. Yes, there are extra/fewer bits to consider when translating between these, but fundamentally there is a direct translation possible, that would still be reasonably idiomatic. Translate a Java program to Erlang, though...you have to completely change the design or it's not at all idiomatic. A task scheduler wouldn't rely on a priority queue; it would rely on spinning up a process per task that would sleep until it needs to execute, for instance.

It is possible but the quality will suffer.

In NLP land, En-Fr unsupervised translation yield significantly better result than say for En-Zh translation.