This reminds me, some years ago as Google was expanding its translation service, someone tried translating text into and out of an obscure African language (don't recall which) and it always came out as weird Biblical-sounding semi-gibberish.

My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.