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• Exhibit shows how bi- and multilingual Facebook posts become 'lost in translation'

Exhibit shows how bi- and multilingual Facebook posts become 'lost in translation'

Western News, May 9, 2023

By Keri Ferguson

Last summer, a post on Shayla Reyes’ Facebook feed caught her attention. It was a picture of a friend in Japan posing with another person in their late ‘20s.

“The accompanying text read, ‘With my grandson’,” said Reyes, a master of media studies student in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS).

“To my knowledge, my friend had never posted in English before and although I had not talked with him in 12 years, I know he does not have a grandson. I also knew his English proficiency is high enough for him to definitely understand what ‘with my grandson’ means,” she said.

Confused, Reyes dug a little deeper.

“That’s when I noticed the ‘see original’ button under the text,” she said. “When I clicked on it, it said, ‘With Mr. Tora’ (a person’s name) in Japanese.”

The post was the result of machine translation, which automatically adjusted the Japanese text into English (continue reading).