I've been trying to learn Spanish, mostly from apps and Pimsleur tapes, so far.
Now I'm trying to work my way through my first book - a Spanish translation of The Hobbit.
I'm using Moon+Reader on Android, so I have fast access to Google Translate.
The second paragraph starts with "Tenía una puerta redonda, perfecta como un ojo de buey, pintada de verde, con una manilla de bronce dorada y brillante, justo en el medio."
Much of that I could follow, but "como un ojo de buey?"
Like an eye of a what? Google translates "buey" as "ox". And then "ojo de buey" as "bullseye", which makes sense. But it translate "como un ojo de buey" as "like a porthole". Which is Tolkien's original English text.
Now I can see how a translator might give "like a bullseye" for "like a porthole", if there wasn't a good word for "porthole". But would any Spanish speaker read "como un ojo de buey" as "like a porthole", or would they see it as "like a bullseye", and Google's algorithms treated this specific match as being more general than it should have?