Facebook’s Machine Translation Makes Ill-mannered Mistake of Chinese Leader’s Name - Creative Word

Facebook have, once again, had to apologise for mistakes made by its machine translation after it mistranslated the name of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

The inaccurate translation occurred when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto civilian leader of Myanmar, posted on her Facebook page about an impending two-day visit from the Chinese leader.

When the posts were translated from Burmese to English, Xi Jinping was incorrectly translated into the slang English term “Mr. Shithole”. There was also an article in a local news journal that showed the headline “Dinner honors president shithole.”

According to an article in ‘The Guardian’ online, Facebook have officially apologised and said “We fixed a technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook. This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologise for the offence this has caused”.

Facebook officials believe that the mistranslation occurred when Facebook’s translation failed to find an exact match for a word it made an assumption and replaced the word with something with similar syllables. During tests, it was found that words beginning with ‘xi’ or ‘shi’ all translated from Burmese into the rude English term.

There have been previous issues with translations from Burmese to English for Facebook, and in 2018, it had to temporarily remove the translation function due to some ‘bizarre results’ found by a Reuters investigation.

Mr. Xi’s visit to Myanmar was planned to celebrate Beijing’s growing presence in the area and was the first by a Chinese leader in almost two decades.
Over the two days, the leaders agreed to 33 projects which, it is hoped, will bring the two countries closer together.

Neither the Chinese, nor Myanmar government, responded to initial requests for comments regarding the mistranslation on Facebook.

The event even appeared to be completely censored in China where citizens have been convicted and imprisoned for much milder disparagement of Mr. Xi’s name.

However, the New York Times ran the story which included a discussion with Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at the University of California in Berkeley.

He said that initially he thought the mistranslation had been “intentionally made it to embarrass Mr. Xi”, but on closer inspection he believed that a machine would most likely make that error as Mr. Xi’s name sounds similar to “chi kyin phyin,” which roughly translates to “faeces hole buttocks” in Burmese.