@vzn Interesting. Can you explain to me why it is not completely wrong? What has the verb "führen" (=to guide) to do with the latin word plumbum, which referes to a well known heavy metal? What have the "Bälle" (like soccer-balls, or Tennis-balls) to do with the spanish word cojones, which refers to hard nuts?

@ThomasKlimpel there is a hidden logic that can be discovered with a little investigation. "lead" in english has two meanings, both the metal and "to guide". "cojones" is mexican slang (my understanding) for testicles the latter of which are called "balls" in english slang. notice did not claim the translations were correct, only that they werent completely incorrect... the key is to think of language translation as full of nuance and ambiguity and not like mathematical logic or equivalences...

Oh, I know that google first translated to English, and then to German. But what I find disappointing is that it has thrown away the meta information before doing so, like that the translation 'lead' referred to a heavy metal, or that the translation 'balls' referred to a slang word.

This meta information is included in any normal dictionary, so the google translation ends up being worse than if you had used a normal dictionary to first translate to English, and then another dictionary to translate from English to German. The actual implementation is just unnecessarily stupid.

did you use translate.google.com? was not aware myself that google is translating thru english as a sort of hub language. they have a smartphone app, have been using it some, it seems to be more polished than translate.google.com. think its possible they have different translation system backends and some are better than others...