Translation errors can lead to prison!

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