Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah Calls Out Meta For ‘Faulty’ Kannada Translation

Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah has strongly objected to “faulty auto translation of Kannada content on Meta platforms”.

This follows after Meta’s automatic translation tool wrongly declared Siddaramaiah dead while translating a condolence message posted by the chief minister’s office on Facebook.

The post, originally written in Kannada to mourn the death of veteran actor B Saroja Devi, was mistranslated into English, drawing flak from Siddaramaiah and an official missive to Meta.

Taking to social media platform X, the chief minister wrote, “Faulty auto-translation of Kannada content on Meta platforms is distorting facts and misleading users. This is especially dangerous when it comes to official communications.”

Siddaramaiah further cautioned, “Social media platforms must act responsibly. I caution citizens to be aware that translations shown are often inaccurate. Such negligence by tech giants can harm public understanding & trust.”

Following the public statement, the CM’s media advisor, K V Prabhakar, formally wrote to Meta urging immediate corrective measures. 

In the letter addressed to the Meta India team, Prabhakar stated, “We have noted with concern that the auto-translation from Kannada to English is frequently inaccurate and, in some cases, grossly misleading. This poses a significant risk, especially when public communications, official statements, or important messages from the Chief Minister and the Government are incorrectly translated.”

Responding to the criticism, Meta acknowledged the issue and said it had been resolved. The company clarified that the translation problem stemmed from an error in its AI-powered machine translation model.

“We fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologise that this happened,” Meta reportedly said in a statement.

This comes at a time when Meta is expanding its support for Indian languages across its platforms and services. The platform has expanded the language options for its Meta AI assistant which is now available in Hindi and Hindi-Romanised script.

Additionally, Meta has increased its capabilities to fact check content in various Indian languages. It has partnered with organisations and expanded existing partnerships to include languages like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Nepali within their fact checking programme.

Previously, there have been inaccuracies spotted in responses of AI bots during multiple instances. One of the widely known instances, was when Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal-led GenAI unicorn Krutrim received flak on social media for its ChatGPT-like chatbot, only a day after its launch for not being trained properly, many others highlighted inaccurate results given by the homegrown AI chatbot, over a year ago.