14 DAY TRIAL // Automatic translation tools are definitely helpful, but they are often pretty inaccurate, and a recent blunder of Microsoft’s Bing translation service is causing an uproar in Saudi Arabia.
A report by RT reveals that Bing translated the word “Daesh,” which is an acronym for Islamic State, as “Saudi Arabia,” thus linking the terrorist group to the kingdom and causing criticism from local users and authorities, including representatives of the monarchy who are now planning a boycott of the search engine.
Microsoft was quick to fix the blunder and repaired the translation manually, with the company also issuing an apology to explain that it was all unintentional.
“This error has been fixed. We apologize for the mistranslation. Errors like this can happen with automatic translation due to incorrect training data,” Microsoft stated. “Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it.”
“Not our fault entirely”
And according to Mamdouh Najjar, VP and National Technology Officer for Microsoft in Saudi Arabia, it’s not Microsoft’s fault entirely that this translation went wrong because the whole service is based on translation suggestions from users. So the more users suggest a certain translation for a specific word, the faster the translation system learns it, so most likely, a significant number of users pointed to “Saudi Arabia” as the correct translation of Daesh.
The bigger problem, however, is that the failure experienced by Microsoft’s translation service comes at a time when Saudi Arabia is already in hot water over terrorist activity, with international bodies accusing the kingdom of supporting several groups, among which the Islamic State.
It remains to be seen if users go forward with their boycott plans against Microsoft’s search engine, but it’s very clear that Redmond needs to prevent similar blunders from happening again, especially when it comes to matters that aren’t very well received these days.