Exhibit shows how bi- and multilingual Facebook posts become ‘lost in translation’ – Western News

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. Reyes, a Canadian Filipina who speaks English and Japanese, has been using Facebook since 2009 to stay in touch with relatives who speak Filipino, English and French, and her friends, who speak English and Japanese. “I didn’t know Facebook was automatically translating the language for me
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