5
votes

I was typing a poem containing the word котейка into Google Translate and I came across this translation:

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Searching for котейка seems to suggest that the word means a cat or kitten. Searching for Mike Farley just gives a lot of people called Mike Farley. Does "Mike Farley" have a special significance in Russian?

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    For some reason Google's Russian in pair with other languages seems to be the worst part of their translation service. When I need to use Google Translate for understanding something written in a language I don't know, I always prefer English as target language, that's much more safe method. So just don't take too seriously anything you get with G-translation from/into Russian.
    – Alex_ander
    Feb 11, 2016 at 9:03
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    @Alex_ander This is because they don't have Any-to-any language translation pairs. In fact they translate everything to and from English as an intermediate language. So, if you want to translate something from French to Spanish it would internally translate from French to English and then from English to Spanish. And on each translation step something is lost.
    – Artemix
    Feb 11, 2016 at 10:54

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12
votes

No, he doesn't (as far as I know).

This seems like a result of misuse of "Suggest an edit" feature combined with erroneous assumptions of Google's algorithm, which maps words and phrases from one language to another based on texts it find on web.

Another prominent example of the same phenomenon: Google translated Russia to 'Mordor' in 'automated' error.

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