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The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker [...] because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing "good morning," which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man's arrest.
[...] the man posted on his Facebook page a picture from the construction site where he works in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit near Jerusalem. In the picture he is leaning against a bulldozer alongside the caption: "Good morning" in Arabic.
The automatic translation service offered by Facebook uses its own proprietary algorithms. It translated "good morning" as "attack them" in Hebrew and "hurt them" in English.
Arabic speakers explained that English transliteration used by Facebook is not an actual word in Arabic but could look like the verb "to hurt" – even though any Arabic speaker could clearly see the transliteration did not match the translation.
Source: Haaretz
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:41PM (11 children)
Oh, really, does it sound too implausible to you? Well, what if you took a moment to remember that this individual auto-translation screwup was just one amongst tens of billions of other words likely also being auto-translated all over Facebook. Does it still seem implausible that one auto-translated two-word phrase out of tens of billions of auto-translated words and phrases might result in a bad translation that could be vaguely interpreted as a possible terroristic threat?
Because this doesn't seem implausible to me in the slightest, in the global context of a site with nearly a billion users deciding to start auto-translating text for their users between languages that don't even share a visual alphabet, much less common grammar. In fact I would expect to see numerous equally bad translations happening during the next couple of decades as auto-translation systems become more common. "Numerous" in terms of absolute numbers, while always being a tiny fraction of the total translations. How improbable is it that if you roll a set of ten 30-sided dice ten billion times you'd periodically roll a 300?
And what the hell kind of threat is it to see a two-word phrase "attack them" on a photo of a man calmly taking a break at work, having a cigarette and coffee while leaning on the tire of his frontloader and (assumedly, the face is blurred) smiling like a normal human being? This is truly a sad story. The only thing that makes it less sad is that the Israeli police had enough sense to immediately release the man after the mistake was discovered, after just "a few hours" in custody. Although he'll probably still be fired by his employer, and put on a terrorist watch list for good measure. But no, even though he has been released by the police already and Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper, his story sounds "implausible". Huh?
Remember, you only heard about this specific translation failure because it didn't translate the words to "rabbit them" or "vagina them" or anything equally silly and innocuous. There are probably millions of those kind of minor translation screwups every day. You just don't hear about all those bad translations because nobody reports them to the local police. This is really the equivalent of a black person's neighbor calling the police to report a "burglar" in the neighbor's front yard, and the black homeowner getting arrested and taken down to the station for the crime of being on his own property. Would an Israeli man (i.e. a "white homeowner") have even been arrested in this same situation?
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Troll) by srobert on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:58PM (2 children)
I'd say it's entirely plausible, but the story should still be verified anyway.
Incidentally, translating your entire 4 paragraphs there into Hebrew and then back into English yields: "Schmuck"
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:56PM (1 child)
Jesus, what is your problem? Someone sneak exlax into your coffee?
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:25PM
Yeah, you're right. It parsed differently than I intended. I was trying to be funny and ended up being an asshole. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 31 2017, @03:35PM (3 children)
Yes.
That doesn't affect the plausibility at all. Remember, it doesn't matter how often Facebook translates "good morning", the result is always the same. Because it's a computer doing it, not a human. And that phrase is not something obscure, it must be one of the most frequently used phrases. Therefore it seems implausible that such a blatant mistranslation remained completely unnoticed, and thus unfixed, until that supposed incident.
Is it implausible that some random phrase may be mistranslated that way? Absolutely not. Is it implausible that such a common phrase as "good morning" is mistranslated this way? Definitely.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Tuesday October 31 2017, @10:29PM
I could see a scenario where Facebook has much of its data on Arabic and Hebrew coming from Israelis who don't trust Arabs. I could imagine a Hebrew meme where someone intentionally mistranslates "good morning" from Arabic into Hebrew, either for humor or for malice. If the Facebook cloud robot got ahold of it, it might start to believe that good morning in Arabic really does mean hurt them in Hebrew. It's not like robots read dictionaries.
Bottom line, there are scenarios where this mistranslation is plausible.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:49PM (1 child)
I get it where you're trying to go with that (which isn't exactly how you originally phrased things, get it, lost in translation?), but you're making some very weak assumptions. You're assuming that what has been translated for us English speakers from the original Palestinian Arabic dialect as "good morning" in English is a phrase that is as culturally common, and as limited in variations and spellings, in Arabic as it is in English. There could be many ways to spell or grammatically construct such a "common" phrase in Arabic, with this being a very uncommonly used variation. As I tried to point out, these languages don't even share the same visual sound representations and almost certainly have significant differences in overall construction. It's not the same as, say, French to Spanish, both based on the same root language with the same alphabet.
But most importantly you're not paying any attention to the fact that it already says right in the summary that "Arabic speakers" confirmed that the mistranslated word bears a vague visual resemblance to the Arabic verb "to hurt". That is precisely the sort of mistake that I would expect a "naive" pseudo-intelligence like a computer program to make, with no thought to the consequences of a bad translation. I've seen Google Translate make many similar types of bizarre extrapolations, and they can vary wildly from one extreme of meaning to another when changing so much as a single character in a block of the original untranslated text. It is very rare that I have any confidence in any translation between Chinese, Korean or Japanese and English, for instance. The shorter the phrase, the more likely the translation will be totally off course, with a single character having a dozen different seemingly unrelated meanings.
One is forced to wonder exactly how many more Arabic-speaking translators you would need to hear from before the story would become "plausible". You provide the impression that you feel people who speak Arabic are automatically untrustworthy.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:55AM
Note that the summary just quotes the article, so it is not an independent source.
All I got was the one newspaper publishing the story claiming that "Arabic speakers" confirmed it. That's not the same as having confirmation from Arabic speakers. Also note that those Arabic speakers were not identified.
So the number of Arabic speakers whose confirmation I have is currently zero. I'd like to have at least one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:30PM (3 children)
> And what the hell kind of threat is it to see a two-word phrase "attack them" on a photo of a man
> calmly taking a break at work, having a cigarette and coffee while leaning on the tire of his frontloader
Methinks the Bear hasn't been paying attention [google.com].
heavy machinery is a useful weapon, readily accessible.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday November 01 2017, @12:05AM (2 children)
Completely missing the point that the supposed vaguely threatening caption of "attack them" does not line up well with the apparent demeanor and tone of the overall photograph, nor its context. Any rational person who simply looked at the photo itself should have realized that the words didn't make much sense. The guy was obviously simply on a break or preparing to get started with his work day, while doing normal human things like drinking a coffee. Just drop your preconceptions about Arabs or Palestinians and look at the damn photo.
Any idiot knows that heavy machinery can be used to do bad things. But people who want to make terroristic threats will normally pair their menacing words with at least somewhat menacing images. If you thought the person in that image was Italian you'd find this whole thing ridiculous.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 01 2017, @12:17AM (1 child)
People in NY look up at low-flying planes.
People in London and Nice keep an eye on trucks maneuvering around.
People in Israel are careful when some Semite drives heavy equipment around. Can you blame them for thinking "attack them", with a smile, should be investigated as an allusion to an attack?
I blame them for not even knowing "good morning" after almost 70 years of daily "interactions" with Palestinians. Not for taking "attack them" on a picture with a bulldozer seriously.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday November 01 2017, @12:42AM
Fascinating that "Semitic" refers to both Hebrew and Arabic speakers, similar to "Hispanic" for Spanish speakers, yet I've never heard "anti-semitic" used outside of the isolated context of what always seems to mean "ethnically Jewish" before. Props for making me open my dictionary app and learn something new.
I can't blame the Israelis for investigating a possible threat. I can blame them for taking the "black homeowner" downtown after he probably told them "hey, this is my own property, I haven't done anything wrong" and they obviously didn't bother to check the truth of his statement. (referring to earlier analogy) Would they have done the same to a Jewish Israeli citizen? I can't picture it.
Otherwise I can't really disagree in general with anything you just said. Your strings of words have truthiness in them.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ