Microsoft’s Bing Translates “Daesh” Terrorist Group’s Name as “Saudi Arabia”

Automatic translation tools are definitely helpful, but they are often pretty inaccurate, and a recent blunder of Microsoft’s Bing translation service is causing an uproar in Saudi Arabia. A report by RT reveals that Bing translated the word “Daesh,” which is an acronym for Islamic State, as “Saudi Arabia,” thus linking the terrorist group to the kingdom and causing criticism from local users and authorities, including representatives of the monarchy who are now planning a boycott of the search engine. Microsoft was quick to fix the blunder and repaired the translation manually, with the company also issuing an apology to explain that it was all unintentional. “This error has been fixed. We apologize for the mistranslation. Errors like this can happen with automatic translation due to incorrect training data,” Microsoft stated. “Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation withi...