Translators Fix "It's Paws" Every Time. "Over Their" Is Another Story.

Here are two sentences, one apostrophe apart:

A: The cat cleaned its paws meticulously after dinner.
B: The cat cleaned it's paws meticulously after dinner.

B is wrong, in the way a large share of the internet is wrong. We sent both through Filipino, Batak Simalungun and Abkhaz and back to English. Both came home as the same sentence:

Out: Cats brush their teeth thoroughly after eating.

Set aside the teeth for a moment. The apostrophe is gone, and nothing in the output records that one of the two inputs had a mistake in it. The same thing happens with their, there and they're, and with your and you're.

So do translation engines fix grammar? We ran more than 200 tests on two engines to find out. Both of them fix the mistakes that leave no other way to read the sentence, and that covers most of the classic homophone errors. The cracks show up when the wrong word happens to make a different sentence. "I left my keys over their" came back from most languages as "I left my keys on top of them."

All results below are real output from Translation Mixer, collected on October 10 and 11, 2026. The main run used Microsoft's Azure Translator for every language it supports, and Google Translate for the languages only Google supports (Hawaiian, Esperanto, Latin, Abkhaz, Scottish Gaelic and a few others). We then switched the site to Google and re-ran the key sentences through Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Chinese. Tables say which engine they come from. Unless a chain is shown, each test is one hop out to a single language and straight back.

Yes, "its" is a real word

Plenty of people suspect that its is the mistake and it's is the only real spelling. It is the other way around. It's is always a contraction, of "it is" or "it has": it's raining, it's been a long day. Its is the possessive of it. As Grammar Girl puts it in Apostrophe Catastrophe, "its" is a possessive pronoun "just like 'hers,' 'ours,' and 'yours,' none of which take an apostrophe either." Nobody writes "hi's paws."

The confusion is understandable because everywhere else in English an apostrophe and an s mark possession: the cat's paws, the dog's dinner. Its breaks the pattern because it is a pronoun, and English pronouns have their own possessive forms.

It is also younger than you might expect. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest example of possessive its is from 1577, and the 1611 King James Bible never uses it. Where a modern writer would put its, the King James says "of it," "thereof," or simply his: "if the salt have lost his savour." When its did catch on during the 1600s, it was usually spelled it's, and according to Merriam-Webster's usage dictionary that stayed the main spelling through the 17th and 18th centuries. The apostrophe dropped out around 1800. So "it's paws" is wrong today, but in 1750 it would have looked perfectly normal.

"It's paws" was fixed in 31 runs out of 31

We sent the broken sentence through 25 languages in the main run, from French and Japanese down to Batak Simalungun and Aymara, and through Google's six big languages afterwards. Not one of them came back with "it is." Here is a sample:

Every middle sentence uses an ordinary possessive. Not one tried to say "it is paws."

Then we sent the correct version, with its, through twelve of the same languages. In seven of them the middle sentence was identical, character for character, to the one the misspelled version produced. In the other five the differences were a synonym or a word order (Arabic picked "claws" one time and "paws" the other), and none of them had anything to do with the apostrophe. As far as the middle language is concerned, you never made the mistake.

Where the fix actually happens

The Filipino, Batak Simalungun and Abkhaz chain is a good place to watch it, because Filipino is the one language in our tests where the typo left a visible trace. Here are the middle steps for both inputs:

Filipino has two possessives here. Nito is the one for things and animals, and kanyang is the one you would use for a person. The correct sentence got nito. The misspelled one got kanyang, so the cat had been promoted to a person, which is a strange but real trace of the typo. It lasted exactly one hop. Batak Simalungun wrote the same sentence for both, and from there on the two chains are identical.

That one example shows the three things that make the "fix" happen.

First, the translator reads your English the way a person does. Translation engines learn from enormous collections of sentences paired with their translations, and the English half of that data was written by the same people who write "it's paws." Whoever translated those sentences wrote the possessive in their own language, because that was obviously what the writer meant. After enough of those pairs, "it's" in front of a noun is just another way people spell the possessive.

Second, the middle language has no way to spell your mistake. French and German do not have an its and it's that sound alike, so there is nothing to get wrong. Once the sentence is in French, the information about which spelling you used is simply gone. This is the same reason the Oxford comma doesn't survive translation: the languages in the middle of the chain have nowhere to keep it.

Third, the trip back into English is written by a model that writes standard English. Look at the Japanese row above. 足を丁寧にきれいにした says "cleaned feet carefully," with no possessive at all, because Japanese does not need one. The English that came back says "cleaned its paws." Nobody fixed the apostrophe. The English side wrote a fresh sentence from scratch, and fresh sentences come out spelled correctly.

So, to the question of whether Google and Microsoft are fixing years of human error: they are, in a way, but nobody built a grammar checker. The engines learned what people mean from what people write, and then they write it back in the most common form.

The fix gave the cat a gender

Correcting the possessive has a side effect. English its is neuter, and many languages do not have a neuter possessive that fits, so the cat had to be assigned to something. Across the 25 languages of the main run it came back as:

• its in 12 (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Cebuano, Javanese, Scottish Gaelic, Latin)
• his in 6 (French, Hawaiian, Aymara, Batak Simalungun, Abkhaz, Ewe)
• her in 6 (German, Arabic, Swahili, Māori, Oromo, Quechua)
• your in 1. Yoruba returned "Wash your feet thoroughly after dinner," which removed the cat entirely and handed the reader a chore.

French made the cat male because chat is masculine, and German made it female because Katze is feminine. Neither knew anything about the cat. In a sense they put the sentence back where English was in 1611, when the salt lost his savour. Ewe and Oromo, in a separate failure, turned the cat into a dog.

Google, given the same sentence in French, Spanish and German, avoided the problem altogether. It used the reflexive construction those languages prefer for grooming (le chat s'est nettoyé les pattes, roughly "the cat cleaned itself the paws"), which needs no possessive, and all three came back with "its." Google's Russian still made the cat a "her."

Their, there, they're and friends

The other usual suspects behaved the same way. Each of these went through eight languages (Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Russian on Microsoft; Hawaiian, Esperanto and Yiddish on Google). In case the rules have gone fuzzy, the middle column says what the right word does:

For the longer version of any of these, Mignon Fogarty's Grammar Girl has good explainers on could of and should of, then and than, affect and effect and loose and lose, where her memory trick is that loose as a goose has two o's.

The miss is worth a look. Hawaiian, the one language that missed "loose," translated it with hoʻokuʻu, which means to release, and returned "Don't drop your keys." That is the "set free" reading of loose, and given the rule above, not a crazy one. "Who's book" was understood by all eight, but French then wrote À qui est ce livre ? ("whose is this book?") and the return trip misread that as "Who is this book for?" The mistake was fixed on the way out and a new one appeared on the way back.

Your and you're follow the same pattern as the rest: your is the possessive, you're is "you are" (Grammar Girl covers this one here). "I know your coming" was fixed too, which surprised us more, because it is actually grammatical (your coming, as in your arrival). Hawaiian and Esperanto both translated it that way: Esperanto wrote Mi scias vian alvenon, "I know your arrival." The English that came back from Esperanto still said "I know you're coming." The return leg wrote the more common English sentence, not the one the middle language held.

"They're car" was taken literally in 7 languages out of 35

"I think they're car is blocking mine" went through 29 languages in the main run and 6 more on Google. Google fixed all six. Of the other 29, 18 used a normal possessive and the sentence came back fine. In the rest, things went sideways:

Five languages read they're as exactly what it spells, "they are," and made the people the ones doing the blocking. The Hindi middle sentence, वे कार मेरे को रोक रहे हैं, is close to a word-for-word copy of the English mistake. Quechua and Aymara kept a "they car" that is not grammatical in either language. Haitian Creole has its own trap: yo means "they," but it is also the plural marker, so machin yo ("their car") came back as "the cars."

Notice who is on that list. Every language with a literal reading is either a Microsoft language or one of the smaller languages that only Google supports. Google's big languages didn't produce a single one.

"Over their" is where the engines split

The hardest test was a sentence that ends on the wrong word:

I left my keys over their.

Microsoft fixed it in exactly one language out of 14: German, with Ich habe meine Schlüssel dort liegen lassen, "I left my keys there." The 11 Google-only languages fixed it in none. Between them, those 25 languages did this:

Seventeen languages put the keys on top of some people. Two put them on top of something those people owned. Arabic, Javanese and Vietnamese invented an object to fill the gap: a cupboard, a lock, and an unspecified "it." Ewe was the only language to keep the mistake exactly as written. Its middle sentence trails off, ɖe woƒe..., "in their...", and the English came back with the same dangling word. Abkhaz, for its part, returned "I left it in my keys."

Then we ran it through Google's six big languages, and five of them fixed it. Spanish wrote Dejé mis llaves allí, French J'ai laissé mes clés là-bas, and German, Japanese and Russian all said "there" as well. Only Chinese held out, with 我把钥匙落在他们那儿了, "I left my keys at their place," which is a more reasonable guess than most.

Our control, "I left my keys over there," came back correctly in 8 out of 8 languages, so the problem is the spelling, not the sentence.

This test shows what the machine is and isn't doing. A person who reads "over their" hears it, and the sound gives it away immediately. A translator never hears anything. It sees the word their, which is a possessive, and a possessive with nothing after it is missing its noun. The nearest grammatical repair is "them" or "theirs," and that is what 19 of the 25 chose. Google's big languages got it right anyway, and the likeliest explanation is volume: with enough English in the training data, "over their" at the end of a sentence turns up often enough, paired with a translation that says "there," to be learned as a spelling habit. The smaller languages never see enough examples for that.

The rule

Put it together and the pattern holds across both engines. A translator fixes your mistake when the mistake leaves no other reading. "It's paws" can only mean one thing, so it was fixed in all 31 runs. "There bikes," "could of" and "walk then drive" are the same. Nobody could mean the wrong version, and these mistakes are so common that the engines have seen them paired with correct translations countless times.

When a mistake makes some other sentence, the translator usually translates that sentence. "They're car is blocking" contains "they are blocking," and "over their" can be repaired to "over them." Google's big languages are the exception. They got both right, most likely because they have seen the same mistakes often enough to recognize them.

The return to English adds one more layer. Whatever English comes out is pulled toward the most common way of saying it. That is what restored "its" when Japanese had dropped the possessive, and what wrote "I know you're coming" when Esperanto had said "your arrival." It is also, in a chain of three languages, what turned paws into teeth.

Try it

This is the chain from the top of the post, with the apostrophe mistake loaded. Run it, then remove the apostrophe and run it again:

→ Run the misspelled cat through the mixer

Both versions should come back brushing their teeth. Then try "I left my keys over their" and see whether your languages put the keys over there or on top of somebody.

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Related: The Oxford Comma Is the Only Punctuation Mark That Doesn't Survive Translation shows the same erasing effect on punctuation. We Typed "idk tbh, hbu?" Into a Translator covers what happens when the input isn't standard English at all.