We've talked here
about translation errors and their consequences. One
of the examples we mentioned was that of Chinese journalist Guan Xiangdong, who
wrote a report on the foreign exchange market and the Chinese currency, the
iuan, whose poorly translated version was responsible for chaos in the
financial market.
Undoubtedly, the
consequences in this case were serious. But what if we say that amisguided
t-raduction has already provoked even the arrest of
a Palestinian by the Israeli police?
In October 2017, a
Palestinian worker posted a photo next to an excavator at a construction site
in the West Bank near Jerusalem, and, in the caption, wrote "good
morning" in Arabic. However, the machine translation showed the word "attack them",in
thetranslation into Hebrew, and "hurt", in the
translation tothe English.
The mistranslation of the
social network caused police districts in Judea and Samaria to be notified of
the palestinian's publication. Another factor that would have influenced
the police to believe the legend was the fact that the man appeared next to an
excavator, a vehicle that was once used by other Palestinians in attacks
against Israelis.
The fact that the
translation was done by an automatic tool contributed
to the deception,since there was no analysis of thecontext, which a
professional in the area could have done.
In addition, the
characters used in the Arabic language are different from those of the English
language, requiring transliteration,that is, the mapping and
transcription of one writing system to another. And automatic
transliteration into English, used by the social network, does
not exist in Arabic; so the translation diverged so much from the
real meaning of the word.
The translation error was only noticed after the worker
was questioned for a few hours. In a statement, Facebook reported
"Unfortunately, our translation services made a mistake in misinterpreting
what an individual published. Although our translators are improving every
day, mistakes like this happen occasionally and we have already taken all
measures to resolve this issue specifically.Contact for more information here:Translation services
