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| Southeast Asia |
| Facebook removes Burmese translation feature after anti-Rohingya posts |
| 2018-09-09 |
| [ARABNEWS] Facebook has removed a feature that allowed users to translate Burmese posts and comments after a Rooters report showed the tool was producing bizarre results. Translating languages that use a lot of allusion is difficult to impossible if you don't know the culture behind the language. A hundred or two years from now "Have fun storming the castle, boys!" will be less comprehensible than "See the chariot at hand here of Love, Wherein my lady rideth! Each that draws is a swan or a dove, And well the car Love guideth." A Rooters investigation published on August 15 documented how Facebook was failing in its efforts to combat vitriolic Burmese language posts about Myanmar’s Rohingya Moslems. Some 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar over the past year amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In late August, United Nations ...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks... Sherlocks said Facebook had been "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate" against the Moslem minority group. The Rooters article also showed that the translation feature was flawed. It cited an anti-Rohingya post that said in Burmese, "Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive." Kalar is a pejorative for the Rohingya. Facebook had translated the post into English as "I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar." A spokeswoman for Facebook said the Burmese translation feature was "switched off" on August 28. She said the Rooters article and feedback from users "prompted us to do this." "We are working on ways to improve the quality of the translations and until then, we have switched off this feature in Myanmar," the spokeswoman wrote in an email. The bad part about censorship is that it doesn't give the lunatic fringe any rope to hang itself. So you end up with it whining and pointing to its boo-boos instead of being laughed at or derided. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 The 21st century's poetry? So sparse, just poor scratchings of poultry Penned in by the strictures Of words... but those pictures: We've all learned by rote their emoji! |
| Posted by: Zenobia Floger6220 2018-09-09 17:17 |