Tech giant Meta has apologised and said it has fixed an auto-translation issue that led one of its social media platforms to mistakenly announce the death of Indian politician Siddaramaiah.
The chief minister of the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka posted on Instagram on Tuesday in the local Kannada language, saying he was paying his respects to the late Indian actress B Saroja Devi. He also paid tribute to the actress on Facebook and X.
However, Meta’s auto-translation tool inaccurately translated the Instagram post to suggest that Siddaramaiah, who uses just one name, was the one who ‘passed away’, according to a report on CNN website.
“Chief Minister Siddaramaiah passed away yesterday multilingual star, senior actress B Took darshan of Sarojadevi’s earthly body and paid his last respects,” the erroneous, garbled translation read, CNN affiliate News 18 reported.
A Meta spokesperson told news agency Press Trust of India: “We fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologise that this happened.”
Also on Thursday, Siddaramaiah criticised the auto-translation tool as ‘dangerous’ in posts on Facebook and X, adding that such ‘negligence’ from tech giants ‘can harm public understanding and trust’.
His posts included a photo of an email his office sent to Meta voicing ‘a serious concern’ about the auto-translation tool on its platforms, ‘particularly Facebook and Instagram’.
The email, which had the subject line ‘Urgent Request to Address Faulty Auto-Translation of Kannada Content on Meta Platforms’, urged the tech company to ‘temporarily suspend’ its auto-translation tool for content written in Kannada ‘until the translation accuracy is reliably improved’.
His office also requested that Meta work with Kannada language experts to improve the feature.
Kannada is the official language of Karnataka and is also spoken in bordering Indian states. More than 45 million people spoke Kannada as their first language in the early 2010s, and another 15m spoke it as their second language, based on the latest available data.
As of yesterday, the auto-translation of Siddaramaiah’s Instagram post reads: ‘The multilingual star, senior actress B Sarojadevi who passed away yesterday, paid his last respects’, which still appears to be inaccurate.
The incident comes months after the US tech giant apologised for a technical error that led some Instagram users to see graphic, violent videos.
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