Another Google Translate Oddity

One of my friends replied to my Christmas Greeting email from yesterday.
At the end of his post were four Chinese characters.

聖誕快樂;

I don't read Chinese but I figured they were probably "Merry Christmas".
All the same, to be sure, I popped them into Google Translate.

It detected the language not as Chinese but as Japanese and provided a translation that said

誕快 Lok St.

Switching to Chinese I did, of course, get "Merry Christmas.