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Volodymyr Zelenskyy translates into evil rules the world. This is not true, though taking groups of letters from within the name, and translating them badly, can result in similar sentences. A post on Facebook, which has also been shared on Twitter, claims that the name of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy translates to evil rules the world when using Google Translate. This is not accurate. Typing the Ukrainian president’s full name into Google Translate with a setting of Ukrainian to English merely results in a change in the spelling of the surname from Zelenskyy to Zelenskyi. However, splitting the name into shorter groups of letters, as the social media posts have done, creates new words, some of which have a direct translation into English. Changing the order of these words results in different phrases being generated. For example, Google Translate translates zele as bad, volod as owner and myr as peace. The posts show a screenshot of a Google Translate page with zele nksy volod myr in the Ukrainian section and evil rules the world in the English section. We were not able to recreate this. Entering zele nsky volod into Google Translate returned evil lord but adding myr to the end of the word returned zele nski volod imyr rather than evil rules the world. Another post features a YouTube video in which the letters and spacing of President Zelenskyy’s name are moved around, and a letter deleted, until they read zele nskyy volod ymy. The translation from Google reads the evil master of the mind, which we were able to replicate. Stay informed Be first in line for the facts – get our free weekly email Subscribe This is, clearly, a bit silly. Beyond the fact that, you can probably cut up anyone’s name to sound a bit sinister in another language (Liz Truss becomes I trembled while Joe Biden becomes where is the poor, when translated from Ukrainian by Google), it ignores the fact that most names do have actual meanings. Volodymyr, and its Russian equivalent Vladimir, does mean ruler, though there’s some ambiguity as to whether it means world ruler, peaceful ruler or other variants. Zelenskyy meanwhile, according to Ancestry, means ‘from Zelenki’ or ‘from Zelenka’, places in Ukraine whose names, in turn, derive from the word for green, zelenyy. Finally, these experiments with Google Translate, by and large, only sound particularly nefarious if you cut the word zele out of Zelenskyy, which Google translates as evil. But that’s not even an accurate translation. Zele, or in Cyrillic script, зеле, isn’t a word in Ukrainian. It is a word in Bulgarian which means cabbage, (though obviously cabbage rules the world doesn't have the same ring to it). When you type zele into Google Translate, set to Ukrainian, it offers to translate the closest word in Ukrainian, zle or зле, which means bad or evil. But the leader of Ukraine isn’t called Volodymyr Zlenskyy. He’s called Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This isn’t the first time we’ve written about false claims based on dodgy use of Google Translate. For example, we investigated claims last year that a market research firm’s name indicated it was trying to kill the public with Covid-19 tests. This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because translating the name does not result in the phrase, though badly translating arbitrary groups of letters from within the name may produce a similar result.
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