Software giant Microsoft has enraged Saudi Arabia after its search engine automatically translated “Daesh”, the Arabic acronym for terrorist organization ISIS, as “Saudi Arabia”.
The incident has led representatives of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, as well as Saudi public, to demand for a complete national boycott of the search engine. The social media community soon became active, with hashtag '#Microsoft_Insults_Saudi' appeared on Twitter as users expressed their outrage on the mistranslation with some calling it as an "insult."
However, Dr Mamdouh Najjar, Vice President and National Technology Officer for Microsoft in Saudi Arabia, took to Twitter to apologise for the mistake.
“I apologise on behalf [of Microsoft] in person as an employee of the company, to the great Saudi people and this country dear to all our hearts for this unintended mistake,” he said.
As per the Huffington Post, Dr Najjar informed that the error was due to Bing’s use of crowd sourced translations. Alternative translations can take the top spot if they are put forward by more than 1,000 people.
Comments
Comments are closed.