Google has fixed a bug in one of its online tools after it started translating “Russian Federation” as “Mordor.”.
Mordor is the name of a fictional region nicknamed "the Land of Shadows" in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books.
Outside of Mordor, "Russians" were translated as "the conquerors" and "Sergey Lavrov," the country's foreign minister , was translated as "little sad horse."
These errors had been introduced into Google Translate Ukraine's Russian service automatically, Google said.
All three terms reflect the language used by some Ukrainians following Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Screenshots of Google's incorrect translations have been posted on social media in recent days.
"Automatic translator"
“Google Translate is an automatic translator – that is, it works without the intervention of human translators, using technology,” Google says in its statement.
The company added that Google Translate works by searching for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents, but translation remained difficult, as the meaning of words was tied to the context in which they were used.
"This means that it is not possible for all translations to be perfect and there will be times when they will be wrong or some words will be translated incorrectly," he added in the statement.
“We always work to fix these errors as quickly as possible when they come to our attention.”
Although translations are managed automatically, it is possible for users to suggest alternative translations manually. However, the BBC understands that this was not how the errors.
The error now appears to have been fixed.
