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Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

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Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#131

Post by mikrotikker »

zogrodea wrote: post #68
elil17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

I have a couple of things to say about this comment. 1. Instagram (and Facebook) are well known to suppress pro-Palestine voices (can pull up many examples but [0] should work because of that person being named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, clearly having some influence though I don't know her), so this seems like something consistent with what the company is known to do. 2.…

> The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place)

God forbid making fun of a religion.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#132

Post by mikrotikker »

_a9 wrote: post #56
O1111OOO wrote: post #38

Performed a quick search for ex-cia working at instagram and came up with a ton of hits related to general information about ex-government agents working in key positions at many tech firms. https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=ex+cia+working+at+instagram&... I'm not saying this translation error is related to that. I'm also not saying it isn't.

After the twitter files I just assume the government has their grimy little fingers in every company that has access to a large amount of eyes, prime for manipulation

Not just the twitter files but the PRISM and NSL leaks, FISA courts etc, as leaked by Snowden. What else is in that trove that we haven't seen yet.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#133

Post by Cyphase »

mikrotikker wrote: post #131
zogrodea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a couple of things to say about this comment. 1. Instagram (and Facebook) are well known to suppress pro-Palestine voices (can pull up many examples but [0] should work because of that person being named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, clearly having some influence though I don't know her), so this seems like something consistent with what the company is known to do. 2.…

> The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place) God forbid making fun of a religion.

You're responding to a point that wasn't being made.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#134

Post by saurik »

slibhb wrote: post #67
elil17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

What's wrong with that? The AI tool did a bad job and they should try to make it better. But I don't understand the relevance of the comparison to a human translator. The alternative to translating this stuff via AI is not hiring humans, it's not translating it at all.

If you are going to make dangerously incorrect mistakes that are biased against certain users, rather than saying "dunno it didn't hurt most people", maybe you actually shouldn't be translating at all.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#135

Post by shashashasha___ »

I assume translating in IG is based on ML based on users data and feedback. so its statistics and not bulletproof. in general its considered a very complex problem as languages are very different from each other. On the other hand, I don't see bbc apologizing for calling hamas terrorists "militants". wonder how many civilians they need to behead and/or burn alive before that happens.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#136

Post by 8organicbits »

Any ideas what software they are using? Alhamdulillah is a very widely used expression. My guess is that they used an LLM, which translated it correctly but then decided to hallucinate more text. If so, that says that lot about their training text...

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#139

Post by adrian_b »

throwaway2203 wrote: post #122
adrian_b wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question is meaningless, because "Allah" is the translation into Arabic of the English word "God". Neither of these two words is a name of a god, which normally does not matter, because both the Christians and the Muslims believe that there exists only one god, so it is not necessary to have a proper name for that god. Obviously, whenever a Christian believer or a Muslim believer speaks about the "God", they spe…

This is not completely correct. Allah is a name as much as it is a "type". One of the things Arabs will point out is that Allah is "special" because it cannot be pluralized and hence is a better name for the monotheistic God than English God or Persian Khuda (which can be). I'm a non-arabic speaking Muslim who prefers in non-liturgical context to use Khuda and have occasionally been "corrected" by well meaning folk.

Allah can no longer be pluralized now, but it could be pluralized in older Arabic, before the conversion to the Muslim religion.

Remnants of that time can still be seen in the Christian/Judaic Bible, where the plural of the cognate Hebrew word, i.e. "Elohim", can be encountered, though even there it has acquired in many places a singular meaning.

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