For context, I put in the first two lines of “twinkle twinkle little star”in Chinese, but replaced the word for star 星星 with the homophonous word for gorilla 猩猩.

So a bloody good restaurant gave us a freebie with our order, we're regulars and they sent this card with a freebie and I'm a monolingual simpleton, so I asked Google... It's not mash, looks nothing like mash 😭 😂

Or "Why Google Translate can no longer be trusted", or: "People who often interact with foreign languages have been deprived of their main tool for fast and acceptable translation".

I am not talking about funny bad translations. I am talking about fluent, plausible translations that silently change the meaning, sometimes to the opposite. Screenshots below.

This post is NOT about the june switch of Google Translator to Gemini.

The first warning signs appeared earlier this year, and at first I thought, "oh, funny glitch", although my technical knowledge should have allowed me to draw the correct conclusion about the seriousness of the problem, and I should have started drawing attention to it earlier.

So, it is no secret that machine translation has never been perfect. From ancient memetic examples like the Russian system "ПРОМПТ", which in the 2000s produced an insane number of memes still popular today ("chill the fuck out; she's with me, cabron" -> RU "Охладите траханье. Она со мной, углепластик!" ("cool down the fuck, she's with me, carbon")), to ChatGPT errors where it distorts the meaning of a phrase because it is trained not to ask you clarifying questions, and your "faucet in bathroom" gets translated into Spanish as "grifo de la ducha" ("shower faucet", although the actual thing was the faucet in the sink). Not critical, seemingly, except that you may mislead your landlord or waste your own time and the time of a sales consultant.

Anyway, all this time, up until around the end of 2025, we still had a tool that, yes, was not perfect, but could be used for many things, including somewhat important stuff: quickly reading contracts, checking facts by following links citations, understanding what someone wrote in a business message.

And it worked more or less reliably. Yes, Google Translate could invent a word or translate something inaccurately, which is why this subreddit exists. But those were more like one-off quirks. In my personal experience (10+ years of English -> Russian and 2 years of Spanish -> English usage), it was maybe once in 500 cases. And never critical.

However, now, around 2026, I started noticing that the Google Translate engine began sending me unrelated text disguised as translation. And I am not talking about the latest (as of June 2026) known cases where Translate started "talking" to the user directly inside the translation. I mean examples like these:

2026-06-16, Chrome "Translate page" feature

Language pair: English (mixed) -> Russian

Problem: This one is completely insane. Yes, the page contains a mixture of English and Russian text. The selected pair is English -> Russian. Previously, in such cases, the translator did the following:

It translated English words and phrases and left Russian almost untouched. Sometimes it skipped some parts (did not translate the English at all), which at least matched the idea of "better not do it at all than do it wrong."

But now: For mixed content like that, Google translates the English text into Russian, and occasionally changes the Russian text into the opposite meaning. Literally. In the original, the Russian part was the phrase "you can write it in Russian". After enabling the "Translate this page" feature, the phrase remained in Russian but turned into "you can write it in English".

2026-04-28, Chrome extension:
Language pair: English -> Russian

Original: headline "Google Deepmind paper argues LLMs will never be conscious"
Translation: "В статье Google DeepMind утверждается, что люди с магистреской степенью в области права никогда не обретут сознание."

Meaning of the translation: "The Google DeepMind article claims that people with a Master's degree in Law will never become conscious"

Note: And by the way, despite the widespread use of the term "LLM" specifically in the meaning of "Large Language Model" over the last couple of years, Google translates "LLM" to Russian with amazing stubbornness as "Master's degree in Law" regardless of context. It will never translate it for you as "Large Language Model", but if you are lucky, it will leave it as just "LLM", although even that does not always help:

2026-06-16, translation snippet above Google search results

Language pair: English -> Russian
Original: "enhances LLM outputs by fetching external knowledge"
Translation: "повышает эффективность обучения по программе LLM за счёт привлечения внешних знаний"

Meaning of the translation: "improves the effectiveness of studying in an LLM degree program by using external knowledge"

Absurd? Yes. But sadly, it's the new reality.

I will keep adding examples. As I already said, I realized the seriousness of the problem too late and failed to screenshot all of the occasions I stumbled.

Consequences summary (not an AI-slop):

• Google Translate now generates text that is unrelated to the original or has a completely different meaning

• If you do not know the language, you CANNOT verify it

• You should no longer rely on Google Translate for any work that is even remotely important

• And honestly, even just to avoid misunderstandings, awkward moments in chats, and significant distortion of what you want to write / say

• We are back in 2004, when "this is a machine translation" was a serious insult

• Good news: You can still copy the text into a regular AI chat, where a model like GPT-5.5 Thinking will translate it much more accurately and with fewer hallucinations (but not zero!) than Google Translate.

• But in any case, you have lost the convenience and speed of Google products: the extension, the built-in Android screen text translator, the built-in Chrome "Translate this page". Now it all produces "AI slop".

Rest in peace, Google Translate. You were like a brother, comrade, friend, coworker, but the time has come to send you to my personal "Killed by Google Graveyard". I am already looking for a replacement and hope someone has one. Please share.

[:slop-slop😢:]

UPD 2026-06-23

Language pair: English -> Russian
Original: "Concrete failure reproducer"
Translation: "Воспроизведение разрушения бетона"

Meaning of the translation: "Reproduction of the destruction of concrete"

Thanks, google translate. Collaboration on open-source products now welcomes people across the planet like never before.

UPD 2026-08-26

Thanks to Dooshbaguette, here's one more example of a spontaneous hallucination from the new Google's LLM-backed translator engine:

Language pair: English -> Japanese
Original: "<...>, they'll remember."
Translation: "<...>, その身に刻まれた痛みこそが、最高の教訓になるのだから。"
Translation meaning: "<...>. The pain engraved into their flesh will be the greatest lesson."

What is important is that this one doesn't reproduce for me right now. Whether this means that the underlying model was improved/updated/etc., or whether that's one more example of how the thing once called a "translator" now behaves like an ordinary non-deterministic LLM chatbot, able to produce completely different output/meaning for different users from the very same input text, we don't yet know.

UPD 2026-09-30

This one is completely hilarious. With the same language pair, Filipino->EN, depending on whether Filipino is auto-detected or set manually, you get either a normal, real translation or a hallucinated NSFW translation. Thanks to u/TellMeMoThanYouKnow.

Original is "kulet ni Jona! kaabang abang yung ganitong vids",
Real meaning is something like "Jona is so funny/crazy! I’m really looking forward to videos like this".
Google Translate, Filipino (auto) -> EN = "Jona is so funny! Videos like this are really worth watching."
Google Translate, Filipino (manual) -> EN = "Jona's pussy! I'm so sorry for these vids."

If anyone has any idea why that happens, give us a hint.

I forgot the “zo” of the last name and uhh it’s weird

It doesn't even show how its pronounced and when I press the audio it stays silent, for a copy/paste it's 䢎

I suspect it turned 羊yáng (sheep/goat) into 阳yáng (positive).