Microsoft Bing Translate and Chinese companies automatically censor certain topics, causing omissions the reader would not recognize, finds a study by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.Lost in Translation: Characterizing Automated Censorship in Online Translation Services by Samuel Ruo, Jeffrey Knockel, and Zoe Richert, looked at four services from Chinese companies — Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Youdao — and one from an American company — Microsoft’s Bing Translate."Across the services, we find over 10,000 unique, automatically applied censorship rules and that all services implement automatic censorship rules that partially or completely omit content from users’ translations. Upon triggering censorship, the services will typically omit an offending line, sentence, or the translator’s entire output," the authors noted."All but one service — Alibaba — performed censorship silently and therefore possibly without the user’s knowledge. Our work reveals the unfortunate reality that, even if users in China have uncensored access to news or communications platforms, what they read or write may still be subject to automated censorship if they must translate between languages."The authors said "crucial ideas" were removed without the reader's knowledge, and censorship ran along certain topics, while ignoring others."The translation services’ censorship primarily targets political and religious expression that runs counter to the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda. Notably, we found a surprising absence of censorship relating to pornography, eroticism, or other more popular targets of censorship, suggesting that the censors either did not expect their censorship rules to be studied or are no longer concerned with hiding the censorship’s true political agenda," the nine-page paper states."We find that some services only scan the translator’s input, not its output, for content to censor. Due to censorship rules’ emphasis on Chinese language content, such services may be preferable for users translating to Chinese but not from Chinese."The authors said their findings showed human rights advocates had more work to do, and in the meantime, the Chinese do not have freedom of information."Our work underscores a greater need for Internet freedom and human rights researchers to translate their work into the languages of those who would benefit from it using human translators or other trustworthy methods. We cannot assume that a reader has access to an online translator that is not compromised and that will faithfully convey what we write," the authors concluded.Nearly all of the censorship rules the athors discovered targeted simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, English, or a mix of these. However, on Tencent’s translation service they found some Uyghur content targeted, such as words for Jihad, love and heaven, martyr, and massacre.Certain names were also censored, such as "Tank man", referring to the person who stood in front of a tank during the anti-Communist protests on June 4, 1989. (The "June 4 incident" was also censored.) Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel-prize winning Chinese author of the Charter 08 human rights manifesto also had his name censored.Tencent even censored the name Lobsang Sangay, political leader of the Central Tibetan Administration in India. It also censored coded references to Guo Wengui, a businessman critical of the Chinese government.Chinese party leaders were also targeted for cencorship, such as recently deceased Li Keqiang, former Vice President Wang Qishan, and Zhang Gaoli, the former Vice Premier of China whom tennis star Peng Shuai accused of sexually assaulting her.Content related to religious and spiritual movements was also censored, especially Falun Gong. Others censored included the Dalai Lama; Yang Tianming, an advocate for the Chinese folk-religious belief Feng Shui; and Supreme Master Ching Hai, a spiritual leader of a Buddhist sect.The authors noted that researchers had already revealed other online Chinese censorship, such as what domain names users can look up, what IP addresses they can connect to, what they can read or search for on the Web, and what they can say over chat apps, live streaming apps, games, and email.
