Vulgar translation goes viral
WASHINGTON: Facebook apologised on Saturday after its platform translated Xi Jinping, the name of the Chinese leader, from Burmese to a vulgar word in English.
The mistranslation caught the company’s attention when Aung San Suu Kyi, the de-facto civilian leader of Myanmar, wrote on her official Facebook page about Mr Xi’s two-day visit to her country.
When the Burmese posts were translated into English on Facebook, Mr Xi’s name repeatedly appeared as “Mr Shithole”. Mischievous netizens latched on to the error.
It was not clear how long the issue lasted, but Google’s translation function did not show the same error, Reuters reported.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, apologised.
“We fixed a technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook,” Mr Stone said. “This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Mr Xi’s visit to Myanmar, the first by a Chinese leader in nearly two decades, was designed to celebrate Beijing’s expanding presence in the region.
The embassies of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of the Union of Myanmar in the United States did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
When Facebook’s system finds a word that does not have a translation, it makes a guess and replaces it with a word with similar syllables, Mr Stone said. After running tests, Facebook found that multiple Burmese words starting with “xi” and “shi” translated to the vulgarity in English.
Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, said when he first saw the translation he thought someone intentionally made it to embarrass Mr Xi.
On closer inspection of the original Burmese post, Mr Wong said he could see how a machine would make that error. Mr Xi’s name sounds similar to “chi kyin phyin,” which roughly translates to “faeces hole buttocks” in Burmese, Mr Wong said.
Greg Garvey, a professor of game design and development at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, said his first intuition was also that somebody had pulled a prank, although there were multiple explanations for how this might have occurred.
When the translation system finds a word that doesn’t have a direct translation, it should put in a replacement word using the context of the rest of the sentence and data from millions of Facebook users. Excluding malicious intent, Mr Garvey said the vulgarity would have been used only if the system’s algorithm found it made sense based on Facebook’s trove of user data.
The exception, Mr Garvey said, would be if there were words that corresponded in Burmese to the vulgarity — a happenstance that Mr Wong and Facebook said did, in fact, occur.