While what you're saying might be true, you are missing the point OP made. He isn't saying the translated text is well written, he is saying google translate has really improved to the point of producing readable text.

Of course you lose a lot of the original's quality, but at least you can understand what you read.

French to English generally works rather well because they have similar sentence structure (except for inverted adjectival order) and neither has a lot of long-distance dependency stuff. Even Systran kicks ass on French to English.

Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things very differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.

I believe the Canadian parliament provides an excellent French-English training corpus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansard#Translation)

For example, see http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan... and http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan...

Possibly, but also consider that English and French are very close. English vocabulary is largely lifted from French (there's the well known statement ascribed to Alexandre Dumas - that English is just badly pronounced French), and while there are some differences in sentence structure, they are fairly basic when you are mostly writing in present tense like here.

His post is written in very clear, straightforward French with few or no fancy flourishes that might complicate the translation. My French is decidedly not the best, and I have no problem reading the original at a decent tempo - there's the odd word missing from my vocabulary that I had to figure out, but that's it.

Total idle speculation, but a while back I read about how google uses statistical algorithms to do their translations instead of using the more traditional machine translation methods. They do this by running the stats on sets of identical documents that are available in multiple languages. Given that French is the other established major international language, I suspect there is an exceptionally good corpus of text to use from international organizations like the UN. I would also suspect Canada has a huge number of documents in both English and French as well.

The source material is written in a rather simple and direct way. Short sentences, very specific words. It may make things easier for Google to translate. Very well written anyway.