Google Translate translates “Russians” from Ukrainian to Russian as “invaders” and “Russia” as “Mordor.”
As you probably know, Google doesn’t really translate anything. It simply picks the most frequent usage from its humongous database. Last year, for instance, there were several months during which the Russian name and patronymic “Vladimir Vladimirovich” were translated into English as “Mr. Putin.” This must have really sucked for the rest of Vladimir Vladimiroviches.
Also, last summer, “Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity” would be translated into Russian as “a political crisis in Ukraine.”
Friend! Remember: when you use Google Translate, you are forced to subscribe to its ideology.
Clarissa's Blog 
Sounds like some insider at Google is deliberately trolling or inserting their own biases, whilst management overlooks because they either don’t know, don’t care or quietly approve.
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This is not manually done. I could buy there being a coordinated Ukrainian attempt to suggest the Mordor translation, for example, but single-author modification of this sort of machine learning framework isn’t easy, and tends to get easily reverted.
I believe the machine learning folk are in agreement with the translators on this one 😉
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You’re probably right, but it seems funny enough to want to imagine someone deliberately hacked the software to come up with this stuff.
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No, this is simply how Google Translate works. It doesn’t translate. It looks for equivalents.
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I gather that from re-reading your posting; it of course makes perfect sense that this is the reason but amusing to imagine what if it were some covert inside joke.
In seriousness, of course, it gives little reassurance that current levels of technology passing as artificial “intelligence” are up to the job, and it might be far simpler for the core part of it to be programmed from scratch, even if it can’t translate everything.
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That’s a great post! I’ve been a machine translator since 1985, and I appreciate it greatly. Thanks a lot, Clarissa!
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Not to “its ideology” but to the current dominant ideology. Google per se does not have ideology. For better or for worse. Once several years ago it translated Tallinn as New York. 🙂
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I’d love to find out how the association between Tallinn and New York was made. 🙂
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I guess this is a question for a specialist in machine translation 🙂
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Machine translation has been killed by Google Translate. For all its faults, its cost is $0 and you just can’t compete with that.
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From the same source – Lavrov = sad horse.
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I didn’t mention it because nobody in North America knows who Lavrov even is. But that “translation” is spot on.
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