A Palestinian construction worker was arrested by Israeli police after Facebook incorrectly translated the text of one of his posts. Haaretz reports that the man uploaded a picture from his job at a construction site with the text “good morning” in Arabic. When officers used Facebook’s automatic translation service to read the post, the text was mistranslated as “attack them” in Hebrew and “hurt them” in English.
According to Haaretz, Arabic speakers said the “English transliteration used by Facebook is not an actual word in Arabic but could look like the verb ‘to hurt’ – even though any Arabic speaker could clearly see the transliteration did not match the translation”. No Arabic-speaking officers reportedly saw the post prior to the man’s arrest. He was released after several hours of questioning.
Read the full article by Sidney Fussell at Gizmodo.