What does "Rice fields" mean?

[Super Sonic]

Sometimes I look at Japanese Wikipedia translated by google into English, and occasionally find the two word exclamation "Rice fields" tacked onto the end of a sentence or paragraph. Is this a Japanese idiom? Anybody have any idea what it means?

[Super Sonic]

Posted this late last night so it's possible nobody has seen it.
For this reason am giving it a bump.

[Super Sonic]

[quote=bigandclever]I think this is right ... the character 'ta' as a noun means 'rice field'. However, when used as an auxiliary verb it means that the thing being spoken about is in the past.

So my guess is the passages refer to something historic and google translate isn't sophisticated enough to spot the context; so it uses the noun version by default and just plonks it in.

ETA this one .. see if this character is at the end of the passage; copy and paste the whole original into google translate; then remove the character and see if 'rice field' disappears.

Edited by bigandclever on Wednesday 27th April 13:53

[/quo That does seem to make sense, thanks :-)