Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has expressed concern about the so-called "faulty auto-translation" of official Kannada content on Meta-owned services, namely Facebook and Instagram. The CM added that such errors have the potential to distort facts and mislead people, especially if it is related to government communication.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Siddaramaiah cautioned, "Defective auto-translation of Kannada posts by Meta Platforms is distorting facts and misguiding people. This is particularly risky when official communications are involved."
In a major goof-up, Meta's automatic translation tool wrongly declared Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah dead while translating a condolence message posted by the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) on Facebook.
The post, originally written in Kannada to mourn the death of veteran actor B Saroja Devi, was mistranslated into English, prompting sharp criticism from Siddaramaiah and an official missive to Meta.
Chief Minister's media advisor, KV Prabhakar, has written officially to Meta to seek intervention urgently. The letter pointed out persistent translation errors and observed that, at times, the output was "grossly misleading." It further stated, "This is a serious risk, particularly when public communications, official statements or significant communications from the Chief Minister and the Government of Karnataka are being translated wrongly."
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Prabhakar also cautioned Meta that large numbers of citizens might not even know they are reading a machine translation and might misread vital announcements.
The government asked Meta to deactivate temporarily the auto-translation feature for Kannada content until the system attains a level of reliability. It also suggested that Meta work with Kannada language specialists to improve the contextual accuracy of translations.
Reacting to the criticism, Meta admitted the fault and stated that it was fixed. "We resolved an issue that temporarily caused this incorrect Kannada translation. We apologise that it occurred," the company stated in a message.
Meta explained that the translation issue resulted from a mistake in its AI-based machine translation model. "Machine translations are displayed to users in different situations on Facebook and Instagram, such as public biographical information and certain individual pieces of content. Here, our model showed a machine translation mistake, which resulted in incorrect Kannada translations on Facebook.
The firm went on, "We applied a solution to make it more precise. We have offered machine translation on Facebook and Instagram for years, and we are constantly receiving feedback in an effort to enhance the technology and enable the machine translation model to learn to provide more accurate information.
A few people on social media supported the Chief Minister's action, with one recommending that the government release their official English translations to prevent future confusion. Meta, with its headquarters in the US, hosts several platforms in India such as WhatsApp, Threads and Messenger, and also Facebook and Instagram.
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