Google Translate has been making some rather unflattering conversions when going from Ukrainian to Russian. "Russia" became "Mordor," "Russians" became "occupiers," and Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, became "sad little horse."

Mordor is, of course, a fictional land from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

Screenshots of the bad translations were captured and passed around Russian social media site VKontakte.

Such translations are a product of Google's automated approach to translation. The service does not rely on manual translations but instead picks up patterns from the hundreds of millions of documents that Google indexes for its search engine. The disparaging terms apparently became widely used by Ukrainian soldiers and activists after the Russian invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea.

In a statement, Google explained that this automation meant that "not all translations are perfect, and there will sometimes be mistakes or mistranslations." The company continued, "We always work to correct these as quickly as possible when they are brought to our attention." The translation service is now reported to be fixed, properly translating the problem words.