The short sentences and relatively simple grammar also remove a lot of the common sources of intelligibility-threatening Google Translate errors. With German->English the most common serious error I find is that it'll unwind a compound sentence the wrong way: matches up verbs with the wrong clauses, orders clauses in an order that ends up nonsensical in English, etc. Scandinavian languages don't tend to use complex, multi-clause sentence constructions, so there's less opportunity to completely screw up the structure.

Google translate is completely worthless between chinese and english (either direction). I'm baffled every time I see people praising it.