A translation glitch has angered Saudi Arabia officials and has led to a call to boycott of Microsoft and its Bing search engine.
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Mr. Najjar claimed that the error could be a cause of the crowdsourced function of the translator, which takes input from a big number of people (in excess of 1,000) to submit a possible translation of the word.
When typing the word Daesh, the acronym in Arabic for the Islamic State, the Bing translation program erroneously provided “Saudi Arabia”.
Automatic translation tools are definitely helpful, but they are often pretty inaccurate, and a recent blunder of Microsoft’s Bing translation service is causing an uproar in Saudi Arabia. Microsoft’s team fixed the error “within hours of learning about it”.
Another said: “Is this a global company?”
Users complained to the Microsoft translator in the feedback forum section.
“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to terrorist groups worldwide, according to documents leaked by Wikileaks”.
“This error has been fixed”. We apologise for the mistranslation.
Dr Mamdouh Najjar, the vice president and national technology officer for Microsoft in Saudi Arabia, apologised for the incident.
Meanwhile, Mamdouh Najjar, a senior official in Saudi’s branch of Microsoft, apologized for the “unintentional error” and said in a tweet August 26 that the translation was fixed.
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In November 2015, a culinary festival in the Galician town of As Pontes, Spain, celebrating its staple leafy green vegetable, rapini, or “grelo”, was accidentally advertised online as a “clitoris festival”, thanks to a Google Translate error.
