CourseNatural Language Processing: The Complete Course · Module 9: Translation, Multilingual NLP and Evaluating Generation · part 64 of 73
Part 64 · Module 9: Translation, Multilingual NLP and Evaluating Generation

Incident: A greeting translated into a threat

42 min read·14 Oct 2026
Module 9 · Incident file · About 30 minutes

What happened

Oct 2017 photo by a bulldozer caption Arabic for "good morning" translation "hurt them", "attack them" arrest released hours later; apology no Arabic-speaking officer read the original first
The reported case in order: a photo (blue), a greeting, a translation that made it a threat (red), and an arrest undone hours later (amber).

In October 2017 a Palestinian construction worker posted a photo of himself beside a bulldozer on Facebook, with an Arabic caption meaning "good morning". Facebook's automatic translation showed the caption as "hurt them" in English and "attack them" in Hebrew.

Police arrested him and questioned him. They released him hours later, when the mistake was found. No Arabic-speaking officer had read the original post before the arrest. Facebook apologised. The case was reported by Haaretz and by The Guardian.

The cost fell on one man, for a few hours, because a machine's translation was treated as what he had written. The model's error started it; acting on the translation without anyone reading the original turned it into an arrest.

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