Google Translate, the translation service of Google, has allowed a major blunder to creep into its service when anyone attempts to translate ‘India is my country’ to Urdu. Because, what comes out in Urdu text is ‘Pakistan is my country’.

If the reverse process is attempted by pasting the same Urdu text for translation into English, what comes up is ‘Pakistan is my country.’

It seems more of a mischievous error than a mechanical one as no other reference to India is translated to Urdu as Pakistan in this facility.

Thus, if one writes ‘All Indians are my brothers and sisters’ it translates correctly — which can easily be verified by going in for the reverse translation process. The same applies for ‘I love India’, which too translates correctly.

But the moment one tries to link the word country to India the translation suddenly goes awry and India becomes Pakistan in the Urdu version.

No such booboo occurs in the Urdu text when the names of countries other than India are entered.

According to the Google website, the internet giant claims that it employs “statistical machine translation”. An e-mailed query to Google about this anomaly did not elicit any response.