The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

Japanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.

There used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth.

It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.