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.

No seriously, I saw many cases with BBC, like when they conduct an interview about political situation with a person pretending to have telepathic abilities.

In this particular case, google translate learns from texts existing in both english and russian (for example newspapers which are published in two languages, etc)

I doubt there are newspapers or other texts where russian article saying "Russia" is translated to english with "Mordor".

It's much more likely a kind of flashmob by ukrainan users who submitted manual corrections to google translate.

BBC reporter breaks 'world's safest drone' http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35240062

FYI in this case the error was in Ukrainian-to-Russian translation, not Russian-to-English.

Haha