Bing Translation Fail Or Deliberate?

Much ridicule has been written on Bing, and with good reason. The most recent fubar is crossing into conspiracy theory territory:

This is how Bing translates “Airstrikes” from English to Hebrew:

bing1

The result is: “The Israeli Strike

Yes, You read that right. Anywhere the word “airstrikes” is written, Bing translates it to “Israeli strikes” in Hebrew.

Like this tweet for instance, reporting about Syria, which now reads in Hebrew: “The Israeli strikes against ISIS in Syria”

bing2

If you can, go to Bing Translate, type “airstrikes,” select translate to Hebrew, and thumb down the life out of it.

12 thoughts on “Bing Translation Fail Or Deliberate?”

    1. I used Bing once, did an image search of “Legolas” for some reason. Moderation setting on.

      Most of the top results were Photoshopped porn.

      Bing is NSFW.

  1. Hi. Sorry to read this.

    As rdc3 rightly points out below, the automatic translation is based on pre-existing translated content coming from many sources. Also, Translator is not a dictionary, it’s optimized to translate sentences not single words. When you enter a single word, sometimes, things like this can happen and thanks to user’s reporting (using the feedback button on http://www.bing.com/translator for instance) we can go and manually fix this.

    Our apologies for this, we’ll take care of this and this should resolve within days.

    Olivier
    Microsoft Translator team

      1. It’s not fixed. I just did it

        ?????? ????????

        I changed to Syria airstrikes and it comes back with
        ?????? ???????? ??????

        Again Israel is automatically inserted.

        I put in airstrikes in Iran and get
        ?????? ???????? ??????

        As if Israel had bombed Iran. No they did not fix anything and it is just as bad with a full sentence

  2. Olivier from Microsoft is telling the truth about this. Statistical translators like Bing associate chunks of text in one language with chunks of text in the other. As a result, if the text from which they learn is in some way unbalanced, translations can be skewed. In this case, it reflects the fact that so much news text is about “Israeli airstrikes”.

  3. Steven DeMonnin

    it looks like they did tikkun olam an the translation. It looks different, and the word Israeli isn’t there. I give you bings translation as of 4pm .

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