[thomasfoster96]

That’s weird — something else must be influencing the translations.

I’m aware that “condescendiente” doesn’t mean “condescending”, but I’m taking it as evidence that Google Translate interpreted “patronize” with the “to condescend” sense rather than the “to sponsor or support” sense, meaning that word-sense disambiguation works better in those instances.

[jolmg]

Well, maybe, and maybe it's also interpreting it correctly when it provides "patrocines", but it also misunderstands the meaning of the Spanish word.

Though, talking about what it interprets or understands of the words is also wrong. At the end of it all (including neural nets), its logic is probably still based on matching words and phrases between languages without really understanding their meaning like you or I do.

Google Translate offers the option for people to correct it, but many people are probably misled by the false friends. Even I don't know of a proper Spanish translation for the concept of being "patronizing" or "condescending". I can't think of a good word or phrase, and I've never heard a Spanish speaker use anything of the sort. It's something I'd have to explain.

Every online translator I check gives me "condescendiente", but if I check Spanish dictionaries, including the most authoritative one at https://rae.es/, they give no such definition. The closest words are the equivalent of "arrogant" and "to spoil" which aren't really the same.

It may be that a proper translation simply does not exist. That also happens. For example, as far as I know, there's no English equivalent of "estrenar" in Spanish, which means "to use for the first time".

[robjan]

If you translate "Don't patronise me" into Chinese, it also translates to something like "don't visit my business" so it appears to be misinterpreting the English.