Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

It remains me to this: http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/i/3/2/d/a/image.r...

The operative quote from the article is: "no Arabic-speaking officer had read the man’s Facebook post."

This reminds me of the kind of alarmist, ham fisted policing we often see in America, where police will barge into an elderly person's home and trash the place because they forgot to double check the address.

Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean, look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to translate it word by word.

So much for machine learning.

Facebook often asks me if I want to translate posts that are already in English. I'm not surprised that "mistakes may happen".

Note that in Arabic there are no vowels. Also note that it's not the common "good morning" (Sabah Al-khair), but a rarer term: one word, 6 letters, no vowels. The equivalent in english would be "gdmrng".