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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: 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.
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(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.