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Translation is a lot harder for language pairs that are less related. Most of the European languages are fairly close cousins, so translation between, say, English and French isn't that hard.

That said, it's generally true that for most NLP tasks, we're doing much better on languages similar to English.

Also note that translation is a very different task than parsing, or part-of-speech tagging, for example. Summarization and translation are both open research topics in NLP from what I understand, and aren't really 'solved' in any language.

translation is also a lot harder for data poor pairs of languages. machine translation relies on training on a parallel corpus (=same text, different languages), and gets better the bigger this is.