Meta apologises for wrong translation that declared Indian chief minister dead

The chief minister’s office has demanded Meta suspend translations from Kannada until accuracy is improved

Meta has apologised after a translation error on Facebook incorrectly suggested that Siddaramaiah, chief minister of the southern Indian state of Karnataka, had died.

The error took place on Tuesday, when the chief minister’s Facebook account published a tribute to veteran Kannada actress B Saroja Devi.

Meta’s automatic Kannada-to-English translation system rendered the post as saying: “Chief Minister Siddaramaiah passed away yesterday multilingual star, senior actress B Took darshan of Sarojadevi’s earthly body and paid his last respects,” according to a Times of India report.

Kannada is Karnataka state’s official language and one of India’s 22 constitutionally recognised languages.

The mistake was flagged on Wednesday by Siddaramaiah’s team, noting the “frequently inaccurate” and “grossly misleading” translations.

In a formal letter sent to Meta by KV Prabhakar, media advisor to the chief minister, he called for a temporary suspension of automatic Kannada translations until the accuracy is improved and for the technology giant to work with “qualified Kannada language experts and linguistic professionals” to do so.

“Given the sensitivity of public communication, especially from a constitutional functionary like the Chief Minister, such misrepresentations due to flawed translation mechanisms are unacceptable,” the letter added.

Siddaramaiah posted the letter on his X account, writing: “Faulty auto-translation of Kannada content on Meta platforms is distorting facts & misleading users. This is especially dangerous when it comes to official communications.

“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.”

Meta responded by apologising and attributing the issue to a technical fault in its machine translation system.

“We fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologise that this happened,” a company spokesperson told the Press Trust of India.

The translation appears to have been fixed and now reads: “Multilingual star, senior actress B Sarojadevi passed away yesterday in Bangalore. I took the darshan of Saroja Devi's earthly body and paid his last respects.

“B Sarojadevi is a great actress. A wonderful actress who played roles in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi languages as a five language star.”

On Instagram however, also owned by Meta, the translation still appears flawed. At the time of writing, it read: “The multilingual star, senior actress B Sarojadevi who passed away yesterday, paid his last respects.”