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Israel Arrested Palestinian Because Facebook Translated "Good Morning" to "Attack Them"

posted by n1 on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-your-words-carefully dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for boru

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:21PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:21PM (#590187)

    1) Make it clear that this is what you're doing, in your native language, before the translated body.

    This may be a good idea for some places, like Facebook, but on private forums posting any non-English may be frowned upon. This is due to the potential risk that the poster may be hiding something inappropriate in the non-English portion that the administrators or moderators can not read (and may not have time or desire to fiddle with on-line translators to see if things match).

    2) Translate the body back and forth to see if your word choice can survive a double-mangling with most of the meaning intact. If it can't, choose simpler words and grammar. Iterate until your message is mostly readable.

    I would also add, keep questions or statements short, to the point, and on-topic. A short simple question, even with broken English, is more likely to get an answer than some page long gibberish that might have a question hidden in there somewhere.

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