Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not translate to ‘evil rules the world’

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. 

What’s in a name

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.