This is why Facebook, and not its CEO, needs to learn Chinese better

Translations can be tricky at their best and it looks like Facebook has learnt it the hard — and extremely embarrassing — way. As per multiple online reports, Facebook’s translation made a huge gaffe when it translated Chinese president Xi Jinping’s name to “Mr Sh*thole”. Interestingly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can very well converse in Mandarin as he once spoke to a group of Chinese students in 2014.
However, Zuckerberg’s social media platform can’t really ‘cope’ that well with the language. President Xi was on a visit to Myanmar when a post about his visit was published on State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s official Facebook page. When translated to English, Xi’s name was translated to “Mr Sh*thole”.
A report by Reuters further revealed that a local Myanmar news site carried a story with the headline, “Dinner honours president Sh*t hole”.
Facebook promptly apologised for the error and issued a statement to Reuters. Facebook said “This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologize for the offense this has caused.”
Further, the social media giant explained that President Xi’s name wasn’t present in its Burmese database and it took a guess at the translation. The social network ran translation tests later and found that the system translated words that started with ‘xi’ and ‘shi’ in Burmese to ‘sh*thole’ in English.
Facebook remains blocked in mainland China but Chinese companies and even government agencies do use the platform to promote their initiatives.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, took a critical stance on China in 2019 at a speech he gave in a university. Criticising China’s approach towards internet, he said that American apps allowed people to protest. “While our services like WhatsApp are used by protestors and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app, mentions of these same protests are censored, even here in the US. Is that the internet that we want?”, said Zuckerberg.