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results of Google translator

Hi, I've used Google translator to translate a bunch of positive and negative sentences from Ukrainian, where the subjects of the clauses are plural. And I am really confused about, is it singular only? Or can we use it with plural objects? For me personally, when I speak English it is so inconvenient to say "these are not my problems" I usually say "it's not my problems" but then I think that I said it incorrectly. So why Google translator gave different results like

"this is my glasses"

vs

"these my glasses"

Thanks in advance.

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    Google Translate is a machine; it knows no grammar.
    – Michael Harvey
    Jan 26, 2019 at 14:17
  • ok, so what is correct? Can I say "it's not my problems"?
    – Taras Kryvko
    Jan 26, 2019 at 14:23
  • Google Translate is wrong. It should be These aren't for all of them. (Except for problem; we usually say it's not my problem even if there is more than one problem.)
    – Peter Shor
    Jan 26, 2019 at 14:25
  • Google Translate uses a machine learning algorithm which sometimes, seemingly at random, gives incorrect or totally nonsensical answers, even though machine learning works better for translation than all the other methods people have tried so far.
    – Peter Shor
    Jan 26, 2019 at 14:28
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    Note that you can say "It's not my glasses" if there is more to the sentence: "It's not my glasses that I'm having trouble with." There it would make no sense to use the plural. But if it is intended to refer to the glasses themselves, you would use they're (they are): "They're my glasses."
    – Robusto
    Jan 26, 2019 at 15:06

1 Answer 1

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"It" is singular. The plural third person pronoun is "they".

It's not my problem

They're not my problems.

In some cases you can get correct sentences in the form "singular is plural" For example "The problem is my friends". It is a little awkward, but grammatically correct. You might think of "my friends" to be short for "the group of friends" (and "group" is grammatically singular). So you can have:

What is the problem?
It's my friends; they want me to go out with them, but I need to study.

Nevertheless, normally we would use "they are my friends" "they are my scissors" "they are my glasses" "they are my problems".

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  • Thanks. What about this example: my friend asks me "What is this in your ears?" and I answer "It is actually earphones" Is it correct? Do I refer to them(earphones) as for a group of objects?
    – Taras Kryvko
    Jan 28, 2019 at 10:41

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