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Comment by dan1234 | Hacker News Reader

That was my first thought, but the article has this paragraph near the bottom:

  "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 were introduced."

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Substituting "Russia" for "Mordor" is oddly specific if this algorithm issue was caused without direct human input though.

As I understand it they're doing statistical translation - they compare versions of the same text in multiple languages and use it to automatically create a model of what things translate to. So if Ukranians are using the word "Mordor" instead of Russia when translating Russian text, then as far as Google Translate's concerned that's the correct translation of Russia.

both ways are "automatic". one is getting source from thousands of translations, the other from thousand of user corrections.

you can only say something isn't automatic if someone with authority over the system executed the manual step.

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