Representatives of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, as well as netizens in the country, have called for a boycott of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, after an unfortunate translation of the word ‘daesh’. Daesh, which has been used to replace ISIS, ISIL, IS, was recently discovered to translate to Saudi Arabia when using Bing translate.

The conversion to the word daesh, not just in Saudi Arabia, is a result of governments’ intention to reject a notion that could be held that the ISIS caliphate is either a state, or Islamic. The Arabic acronym is taken from ‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham’, which according to reports could be seen as an insulting term to mean, “to trample down and crush” or “a bigot who imposes his view on others.”

The name change has been proposed as a way to prevent discrimination against the vast majority of Muslims, by making a connection to them and extremists. Bing’s recent translation seems to have undermined this.

#مايكروسوفت_تسيء_للسعودية
الشعب السعودي بصوت واحد:
تمت المقاطعة #bing @bing@bingads@Microsoft_Saudi @microsoft pic.twitter.com/IbFZERETAb

— محمد الشقاء (@Alshega) August 26, 2016

Microsoft was quick to apologize for the translation, saying in a statement, “Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it.” The mishap occurred, it’s thought, because of the function of crowdsourcing translations. It seems some people – around 1,000, according to representatives of Microsoft in Saudi Arabia – gave Saudi Arabia as a viable translation of deash. The function is there to help better translate nuanced words and give more accurate translations, but it can obviously be abused.

The translation is a hyper-sensitive matter. In 2009 WikiLeaks cables said that a massive source of funding to militant groups came from Saudi Arabia, while other reports that have come to light recently have suggested a link between 9/11 and the Saudi Arabian government.

Similar embarrassing translations are not uncommon, and have also resulted in the ire of a large group of people.  Earlier this year Google had to apologize after its translation tool translated the Ukrainian word for Russia to Mordor, the evil place we all know from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In this case Google said that this had nothing to do with human intervention, rather it was a result of its fully automatic translating algorithm just coming up with an unfortunate translation.

photo credit: Maxime Dinaux : Speech balloon via photopin (license)