Explanation for those unfamiliar with Russophone online culture: in the Russian-speaking internet, Russia's gopniks (approximate equivalent of England's chavs) have for a long time been occasionally referred to as orcs or goblins. In the context of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, this has expanded to anti-Putinist opposition and pro-Ukrainian trolls labeling pro-Putin Russians as orcs, and Russia itself as Mordor, land of the orcs. (Examples of usage: <a href="http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/" rel="nofollow">http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/</a> <a href="http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html" rel="nofollow">http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html</a>)<p>This also ties into an old Russian geek tradition of identifying fantasy-genre elves with America and the West (which is very obvious in some fictional universes; e.g. in Tolkien's works, Valinor geographically corresponds to North America), with the natural implication that orcs and goblins (the opponents of the elves) are Russians, and therefore basically good guys but tragically misunderstood by the world. See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer</a> for this viewpoint expanded into a novel.<p>So either google's algorithms had identified a sufficient number of humorous references to Russia as Mordor, or some intrepid band of trolls decided to google-bomb the algorithm to push this translation.
I wonder if these "algorithmic errors" are the result of people "maliciously" training Google Translate, since there's the option to correct and give a better translation. I wouldn't be surprised if it were programmed to automatically assume that a correction is good if multiple people correct the same thing, which would then lead to these gaffes as communities like 4chan figured it out and "exploited" it.
Tangentially reminds me of the recent Ludum Dare "best innovation" winning game entry that uses Google auto-correction (not translation):<p><i>Infinity Monkey Autocorrect</i><p>"This funk-filled game explores what would happen to the Infinity Monkey/Typewriter Theorem if it had a commercially-biased autocorrect. The game submits to a growing body of monkey-submitted literature."<p><a href="http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=45696" rel="nofollow">http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid...</a><p>View the growing body of literature submitted through the game by monkeys (players):
<a href="http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt" rel="nofollow">http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt</a><p>Extract:<p>"the difference, quickbooks online baby eats frog laid. the university favoured.. Dkdkbi ignored.. B bet but, the quotes"<p>Fantastic :)
Related algorithmic gaffe, "Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’": <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-showing-limits-of-algorithms/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tag...</a>
The way Google Translate works, which is actually explained pretty nicely by Google statement quoted in this article, makes this a non-story in my opinion. Whether by an intentional attack (somehow flooding the Google corpus [the whole indexed web in a given language?] with biased texts) or a statistical mishap, this is ultimately fairly uninteresting when you realize that: no, no one at Google "snuck" this in there.<p>In the attack scenario, if there were details as to how someone pulled off a Google-bomb style attack, that would be kind of fun and interesting. Otherwise, there's not much to say.
here is another weird translation bug <a href="https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20write%20a%20response" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20w...</a>
Ukraine is awesome!<p>They also had Darth Vader running for mayor.<p>'He joins Peking Duck and a man calling himself Putin in the leadership race.'<p><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-for-mayor/" rel="nofollow">http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-...</a>
Also related, Google Translate can "learn" and "translate" lorem ipsum: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hue43an" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/hue43an</a><p>Not sure if this is a bug or a feature.
This is bizzare for me since I was messing around with the XKCD-substitutions plugin a few weeks ago, and replacing "Russia" with "Mordor" was one of the changes that I made.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions/jkgogmboalmaijfgfhfepckdgjeopfhk?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...</a>
And can you guess whom they translated as Sauron or Morgoth?<p>And it's not like it's the first time ;) <a href="http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm</a>
This was likely an issue of machine learning. The machine learning picked up on patterns people were using.<p>Note, I have no inside knowledge. But, the usefulness of machine learning for things like this.
Wild guess: It probably took 'Mir', meaning world, kingdom, etc. in Russian, and made a connection to "Mordor", or perhaps "Mordor" is even spelled as "Mirdor" in Russian.