“This should not have happened and we are
taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the company said
By
Mariel Padilla
 |
|
Facebook
attributed the mistranslation of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader’s name, to a
technical
issue. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times
|
Facebook apologized 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 Daw 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.”
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,
apologized on Saturday.
“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 on Saturday.
News of the vulgar translation appeared to be
censored in China, where major news websites and social media platforms were
silent about it. In China, citizens have been detained, and even convicted and
imprisoned, for much milder derision of Mr. Xi.
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 in Berkeley, Calif., 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 “feces
hole buttocks” in Burmese, Mr. Wong said.
Greg Garvey, a professor of game design and
development at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said his first intuition
was also that somebody had pulled a prank, though 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.
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