Over the weekend, some users noticed a questionable result when the Arabic word for the Daesh terrorist group was entered into the program. Translated into English, "Daesh" became "Saudi Arabia."
Naturally, representatives of the Saudi monarchy were irate, with many calling for a boycott of Bing and its parent company, Microsoft.
"The Saudi people in one voice: Bing has been boycotted," said one tweet.
— محمد الشقاء (@Alshega) August 26, 2016
"This clip shows the translation on the Bing website, unfortunately this is an insult to us and we must boycott them," said another.
— ولــــه العبداللطيف (@walah9999999) August 25, 2016
Microsoft claimed that they quickly addressed the issue, and the error is under investigation.
"Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it," a Microsoft spokesperson told Sputnik.
The error has a certain air of poetic justice, given the accusations of the kingdom’s involvement in supporting many terrorist groups, as well as participants in the 9/11 terrorist atrocity that killed some 3000 people on US soil.
"Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taliba], and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources, often during Hajj and Ramadan," reads a US diplomatic cable from 2009, released by WikiLeaks.
"Increasingly, voices have been raised against Saudi Arabia and the spreading of Wahhabi fundamentalism through the Saudi-run Great Mosque of Brussels and the Centre Islamquie de Belgique (CIB) of Molenbeek, where many young criminals were recruited for making the trip to Syria," French journalist Karel Vereycken told Sputnik in March.
Maybe the translation wasn’t that far off, after all.
