A snafu with the translation engine in Microsoft's Bing search engine has landed Redmond in hot water with the Saudi authorities. 
 
 Over the weekend, Saudi Arabian users found that when they typed the Arabic word Daesh – the name of the medieval terror bastards currently losing their battle for a caliphate in the Middle East – into Bing Translator, the computer told them that the English translation was "Saudi Arabia." 
 
 The news spread on social media and a campaign was quickly organized in Saudi Arabia calling for a boycott of Microsoft products. Redmond's engineers moved fast to head off the PR disaster, and have now fixed the issue. Microsoft staffers also apologized to Saudi officials for the blunder. 
 
 "Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Reg. 
 
 According to Dr Mamdouh Najjar, VP and national technology officer for Microsoft in Saudi Arabia, the error occurred because Bing Translator has a crowdsourcing function – if a large group of people (he estimated over a thousand) suggest a translation, then it becomes listed as a possible answer. 
 
 The issue has now been fixed, but it's a very sore point for the Saudis, who are fighting a proxy war against the Daesh-bags in Yemen. Expect to see more fallout from this one. ® 

 Bing, Microsoft’s version of Google, just learned the hard way that fucking up your translation service is a bad way to win friends on the internet. 
 
 According to a report in the Guardian, the search engine’s translator thought the word “Daesh”—the Arabic word for the Islamic State—meant “Saudi Arabia” in English. 
 
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 The error was pointed out by people on Twitter: 
 
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 The company was quick to respond. Mamdouh Najjar, a vice president for Microsoft who works within Saudi Arabia, told the Huffington Post Arabia that the mistake may have been due to the crowdsourced nature of the translator—when it receives a suggestion from 1,000 people, he said, the service may opt to go with that translation. 
 
 “Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it,” a spokesperson for Microsoft later told the Register. 
 
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 Just last week, Bing’s map service screwed up when it positioned Melbourne, Australia in the wrong hemisphere. A program manager noted on Twitter that the mistake was due to...Wikipedia. 
 
 In an earlier email to Gizmodo, a Microsoft spokesperson further explained that Wikipedia data, among other data sources, “is used to provide rich descriptions for some results on the Bing Maps website. These descriptions are then linked to our location data for positioning them on the map.” 
 
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 Of course, Bing isn’t the only service to use crowdsourced data. Google users can add and edit places on the Maps platform, and in 2014, Google briefly showed the Wikipedia page for Ebola above the Center for Disease Control’s information, the New York Times reported. And Bing’s translator certainly isn’t the only translation service to spit out erroneous results—Google translated “Russian federation” into “Mordor” in January. (A spokesperson blamed the mistake on “automatic translation.”) 
 
 Still, there’s no getting around the fact that relying on crowdsourced data can be a tricky proposition. Then again, at least it wasn’t dick pranksters this time. 
 
 [The Guardian] 

 The text translator’s blunder put down to crowdsourced suggestions after anger from Saudi officials and social media called for countrywide boycott 
 
 Microsoft has been forced to apologise after its Bing translation service suggested that the Arabic name for Islamic State “Daesh” meant “Saudi Arabia” in English. 
 
 
 
 The blunder was spotted by Saudi social media users, who called for a boycott of all Microsoft products, causing the mistranslation to go viral, and leading to a public outcry. 
 
 ibrahim abdullah (@hemo53578) #ترجمه_bing_تصف_السعوديه_بداعش 
 
 
 
 @bing shame on you pic.twitter.com/v3iP4KnMmM 
 
 Microsoft’s vice president for Saudi Arabia, Dr Mamdouh Najjar, said: “As an employee of [Microsoft], I apologise personally to the great Saudi people and this country, dear to all our hearts, for this unintentional mistake.” 
 
 Najjar told the Huffington Post that the error was most likely due to Bing’s use of crowdsourced translations. The service can promote alternative translations to the top spot if they receive suggestions from about 1,000 people, which means that without manual correction it is possible to manipulate the system and substitute the correct translation for an alternative. 
 
 Najjar said the company was investigating whether that had happened in this instance. Microsoft apologises to Saudi officials and a spokesperson said that the error had been corrected within hours of the company being informed and that steps have been put in place to avoid the same thing happening again.
– Whoops: Microsoft has apologized after its Bing translator mistakenly translated "Daesh," the Arabic name for ISIS, into "Saudi Arabia" in English. Social media users in Saudi Arabia angrily pointed out the error, the Guardian reports, and it quickly went viral. "As an employee of [Microsoft], I apologize personally to the great Saudi people and this country, dear to all our hearts, for this unintentional mistake," the company's VP for Saudi Arabia tweeted. Gizmodo reports that the VP further explained to Huffington Post Arabia that Bing uses crowdsourced translations—so, if enough people suggested that "Daesh" should be translated to "Saudi Arabia," the service may have started using that translation. Whatever the cause, "Our product team fixed the error in the automated translation within hours of learning about it," a Microsoft spokesperson tells the Register.