Technical error caused vulgar translation of Xi Jinping's name: Facebook

Theerrorcame to light on the second day of a visit by the president to the Southeast Asian country, where Xi and state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi signed dozens of agreements covering massive Beijing-backed infrastructure plans.

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A statement about the visit published on Suu Kyi’s officialFacebookpage was littered with references to “Mr Shithole” when translated to English, while a headline in local news journal the Irrawaddy appeared as “Dinner honours president shithole”.

It was not clear how long the issue lasted but Google’stranslationfunction did not show the sameerror.

"We fixed atechnicalissue thatcausedincorrecttranslations from Burmese to English onFacebook. This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologize for the offence this hascaused,"Facebooksaid in a statement.

TheFacebooksystem did not have President Xi Jinping'snamein its Burmese database and guessed at thetranslation, the company said.Translationtests of similar words that start with "xi" and "shi" in Burmese also produced "shithole", it added.

Facebookis blocked in mainland China. But it is not blocked in Hong Kong and mainland companies advertise elsewhere on the platform, making ChinaFacebook’s biggest country for revenue after the United States. It is setting up a new engineering team to focus specifically on the lucrativeChineseadvertising business, Reuters reported last week.

Facebookhas faced numerous problems withtranslationfrom Burmese in the past. In 2018 it temporarily removed the function after a Reuters report showed the tool was producing bizarre results.

An investigation documented how the company was failing in its efforts to combat vitriolic Burmese language posts about Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, some 730,000 of whom fled a military crackdown in 2017 that the U.N has said was conducted with “genocidal intent”.

It also showed thetranslationfeature was flawed, citing an anti-Rohingya post advocating killing Muslims that was translated into English as “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar”.