Industry Minister Ryosei Akarazawa has taken aim at X's automatic translation feature after it replaced the name of Bangladesh's sitting prime minister with that of the predecessor his government has opposed, he said at a Nov. 6 news conference. "This is serious, a grave situation," Akarazawa said.
According to Akarazawa, he met Prime Minister Tarique Rahman of Bangladesh on Oct. 28 and posted about the meeting in Japanese the same day. The automatic English translation replaced Rahman's name with that of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Akarazawa's complaint lands as Tokyo works to build ties with a government that replaced Hasina's. A translation error that reintroduces her name into an official's account of a leader-level meeting is the kind of failure that reaches the people the government is trying to court.
Accuracy question for platforms
The minister did not say whether the industry ministry has asked X to correct the translation or change how the feature works. He raised the error as a problem in its own right, describing the mistranslation of a head of government's name as no small matter.
X's automatic translation runs on posts without the author's involvement, so a name can change after a post is published. Readers of the English version of Akarazawa's Oct. 28 post would have seen Hasina credited with a meeting she did not attend.