To help my fellow English-speakers: "halb zwei" ("half two") is the German idiom for "halfway [between one and] two o'clock" "deux heures et demie" ("two hours and one half") is a much better cognate for the English "half past two o'clock" We're all used to off-by-one and fencepost errors. To be honest, this is probably a less interesting one of Google translate's mistranslations. But it's one that's very mechanical…
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
For instance, for the last five years or so I've been seeing GT translate the Greek word for "swallow", the bird, to the French word for "to swallow", the verb [1]. In Greek and French, the two words have nothing in common (Greek is helidoni/katapino, French is hirondele/avaler). But in English, they are homonyms (swallow/swallow). It seems that GT sees a Greek word, translates it in English, then finds a set of homonyms and simply chooses the translation that's most "likely", meaning the one that's used to most often- which of course means it gets one meaning wrong all the time.
Last year Google made a big todo about its neural nets inventing an "interlingua", an intermediary language to which and from which all other languages it knows can be translated. In practice, I think this "interlingua" ends up being just plain old English.
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[1] Recently I started seeing the translation "machaon", a kind of butterfly, which Google translates in English as "swallowtail". "Avaler" is still available as an alternative.