[tsimionescu]

I believe English is actually one of the only ones where cult has a negative connotation, and where sect does not. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Russian - all of these use "cult" to mean any religious group, even in official language ("the Catholic cult"), and all use "sect" to mean "a fringe, possibly dangerous, religious or quasi-religious group" ("the members of that sect that poisoned themselves").

[kragen]

holy shit you speak a lot of languages

respect

[tsimionescu]

Oh, not even close. I speak Romanian, English, and French. For all of the others I looked up Google translations of the phrase "I think he joined a cult" - in all of them, the translation replaced "cult" with some equivalent of "sect".

Also, I noticed that for more obscure languages (including Romanian), it didn't, so that confirmed to me it's not some fully hardocded conversion - for languages where it has enough examples it understands the "proper" translation, for those where it doesn't it does the simpler thing.