Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly translated if you aren't expecting it.
The translation of the above article is pretty good because a number of people have looked at it and made corrections, but the average German Newspaper article translation is nearly incomprehensible.
AFAIK Google translate is trained by using corpora of documents that have known-good translations. I could imagine that they are trained using EU documents, as these would usually be available in multiple languages. That would explain why performance on stuff published by the EU is so good...
Google Translate grew up on EU parliamentary publications.
I have been in Berlin. vs I have in Berlin been. Its not the exact translation and maybe theres a beter example but its the idea.
Ich bin in berlin gewessen.
There is also all the declinations. But yeah its noy japanese.
> I have been in Berlin. vs I have in Berlin been.
Here's another example: "I took out the trash" vs "I took the trash out".
In Japanese, you'd say "Berlin ni ita", or translating rather literally, "Berlin in was". You'd omit the "I", which can lead to some interesting misunderstandings.
Needless to say, Google translate borders on useless here.