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Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

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Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#61

Post by megous »

shp0ngle wrote: post #32
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

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.

Most sources for machine translation from Arabic-English pairs are data from US Army / anti-terrorist data. So the data are learned to translate terrorist messages very well, as well as army terms. However, it doesn't translate day-to-day use that well. Machine learning is only as good as the source data - and Arabic-English language pair specifically has data from US military complex, that loves translating terroris…

Makes me less confident in US CT capabilities.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#63

Post by guelo »

fortythirteen wrote: post #59
smileysteve wrote: post #5

This is scary and 1984 ish. A man was arrested because of a bad translation.

What's even more 1984-ish is that the phrase "attack them" will get you arrested in Israel.

Only if you're not of the favored ethnic group.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#64

Post by psyc »

mrguyorama wrote: post #54
Synaesthesia wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US which has freedom of speech laws. But which country has arrested users for Facebook posts other than authoritarian countries? Particularly for such a relatively innocuous post.

You can be arrested in the US if you were to post a legitimate threat

The bar for arrest is lower than that. You can be arrested for posting rap lyrics that somebody else interprets as a threat.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#66

Post by hodgesrm »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

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.

A while back I heard a story from a doctor friend about colleagues who would use Google Translate to translate notes to Spanish-speaking patients. That kind of stuff is an accident waiting to happen.

The issue is not machine learning per se although that's behind a lot of the free services that have popped up. Rather it's that once you get outside the scope of translations the system can handle the results may be catastrophically bad. You can't judge the risk unless you understand the assumptions behind the translation service. Most people don't know this and just use free services without thinking.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#67

Post by [deleted] »

rbanffy wrote: post #14
ch4s3 wrote: post #4

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.

I would consider obvious it'd be enormously advantageous for Israeli police to have, at least, a basic understanding of Arabic. It's like a Miami policemen without any Spanish/Portuguese knowledge.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#68

Post by maxerickson »

bigbugbag wrote: post #47
maxerickson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame should rest mostly on the police.

IMHO responsibility is 90% facebook, 8% people who reported it and 2% police. I do not expect police officers to be expert in using facebook.

It's not so much being Facebook experts as it is actually having a solid pretext for an arrest.

I guess if Facebook isn't marking the automatic translations that is a problem, but they shouldn't be giving someone a bad day before they understand which part of the post he wrote and what it likely means.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#69

Post by kwhitefoot »

I pasted the offending Arabic into Google translate and got "Become them" (https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D9%8A%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%...).

Bing just says "become", Translate.com and Cambridge dictionaries have "Come in the morning to them".

Yandex says "ISG world"!

All a bit odd or downright weird but none so threatening as Facebook's. Was Facebook's translation engine sabotaged?

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#70

Post by Stranger43 »

How does that happen?

I know that "googlebombing" google translate used to be a thing as i have seen it done fairly often(usually stuff like translating android to iphone etc) in the Danish/English translator, where the fact that a few votes could change a words meaning.

I wondering if what happened here is a less harmless version of that were a group of people deliberately messing with crowd sourced translation tools, and if facebook have any kind of sanity checking on their translate function or if they are as vulnerable as google translate to that kind of manipulation?

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