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To translate Russia as Mordor can then be explained like this: This approach works better in some languages than others, but combined with other techniques, it can provide fairly decent results. Statistically, it finds equivalents between languages because after a certain number of occurrences in a given language, it infers that a certain word happens in a certain way. The tool analyzes millions of documents and matches certain words, certain habits of language. Therefore, Google Translate ultimately depends on data provided and created by us, the general public. The search giant does not rely on simple dictionaries, but on huge databases, and many entries are web pages indexed by its own search engine. In reality, they are the result of a translation of the Ukrainian language into the Russian language. So how can these machine translation errors happen?įirst of all, one needs to remember that these errors are not produced by any particular language. Well, Russians may have bad press, but for Google to say this. According to Google translate, Mordor is real and is none other than Russia. To continue with the story, "Russians" became "occupiers". Tolkien's "The Lord of Rings" fictional universe, the region occupied and controlled by Sauron). So, according to BBC reports, the tool recently found no better match for the country name "Russia" than "Mordor" (or Black Land in J. but some are a little more odd than others. It relies on thousands of alingned, bilingual documents.

But voila, Google translate is an automatic tool, and is likely to produce errors. Because of its ubiquity and availability, it is a product that is hard to beat. And let's be fair, Google Translate's machine translations are often of good quality considering it is a very general software, an "non-customized machine translation engine" (read more about how machine translation works here). It is extremely convenient to use and it has become a reference tool for translation professionals and users of translation services at least to discern or understand texts in foreign languages. We have to say that Google has had the good taste to offer its product in mobile applications, and even applications for smartwatches in addition to the web version. Google Translate is one of the most widely used translation tools worldwide. Now, Google provides another interesting translation error. This was due, at the time, to the larger amount of data linking the words "President" and "Bush". Some years ago, it proved unable to translate President Obama and it kept naming him "Bush".

Google Translate errors have become a kind of popular culture joke (see our previous entry about the "clitoris festival" in a Spanish town).