Saudi social media users boycott Bing for translating Daesh as Saudi Arabia
30 Aug 2016
Social media users in Saudi Arabia are demanding a boycott of Microsoft after its Bing search engine erroneously translated Daesh, the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State (Isis), into "Saudi Arabia".
Irate users in the kingdom voiced their outrage over the gaffe and called for a boycott of both Bing and Microsoft using the hashtag "#Microsoft_Insults_Saudi".
"As an employee of this company [Microsoft], I personally apologise to the people of great Saudi Arabia, which is a country very close to our hearts, for the unintentional error," Dr Mamdouh Najjar, vice president and national technology officer for Microsoft in Saudi Arabia, tweeted in Arabic.
Microsoft had also reportedly apologised to the Saudi monarchy for the error.
Najjar told Huffington Post Arabi the error could be due to Bing Translator's crowdsourcing function where a large number of people - usually over 1,000 suggested a specific translation, it was then automatically listed as the preferred possible answer.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that the company's product team fixed the automated translation error "within hours of learning about it".
Posting a screengrab on Twitter, Najjar later tweeted in Arabic, "The fix has been implemented and this could have been caused due to many reasons that we are working to find out."
Meanwhile, according to commentators, while perfection in translation was not expected from online translation tools, it was the minimum expectation that they would not falsely identify countries as being synonymous with terrorist groups that committed gruesome atrocities.
According to commentators, the search engine's blunder followed accusations that Saudi Arabia supported multiple terrorist groups.
In April, Riyadh's possible link to 9/11 attacks was brought to the spotlight, after it emerged that an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington was found containing the flight certificate of an Al-Qaeda operative, leading to the US Senate passing a bill that would allow families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia (See: US Senate's 9/11 bill against Saudi Arabia set for Obama veto).
