Aug 11, 2006  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

When a gay blogger who writes under the name Al-Fil Al-Jamil typed “gay” into Google’s translation tool last month to find its Arabic equivalent, he was surprised by the result.

The term that popped up, “luti,” is the Arabic equivalent to “sodomite.” Upset over the translation, Al-Jamil posted his findings on his website, gaymiddleeast.blogspot.com, home to his blog since April.

“‘Luti’ is such a demeaning term, much worse because people can pretend it’s legitimate because it’s old and not used in the street,” Al-Jamil, who lives in Beirut but is currently traveling, said in an e-mail interview. “It’s pretty much the same as ‘fag’ and ‘sodomite.’ ‘Fag’ is used in the street horrifyingly. ‘Sodomite’ is not. But that does not make ‘sodomite’ a neutral term. ‘Luti’ is used in almost the exact same manner as ‘sodomite.’”

Al-Jamil said he alerted Google to the problem, but was disappointed when he received an automated response.

“The response I got was just a tiny letter, which simply copied and pasted a vague reference to translation for Google’s website,” Al-Jamil said. “ I was mostly just annoyed. I never really thought Google did it on purpose, but I figured it didn’t know any better. I wasn’t seeking a huge apology. I just wanted them to change the translation.”

GOOGLE DID NOT respond to inquiries for this story, but Al-Jamil posted the company’s response on his blog site under the heading “Google doesn’t care if it’s homophobic.”

The letter reads, “Unfortunately even today’s sophisticated software doesn’t approach the fluency of a native speaker … we’re continually working to improve the quality of our automatic translation. In the interim, we hope the service we provide is useful for most purposes.”

Some gay activists said Google’s perfunctory response should not be viewed as anti-gay.

“Their first reply to the Middle East Gay Journal seemed to me like an automatic response, not a homophobic one,” said Bassam Kassab, a coordinator for San Francisco-based Southwest Asian & North African Bay Area Queers

Dissatisfied with Google’s response, Al-Jamil wrote another letter to the company and received a response a week later from Sherif R. Iskander, a Google manager in the Middle East.

The letter apologized for the translation and the translations were then corrected, according to Al-Jamil.

GOOGLE’S TRANSLATION TOOLS operate under a statistical model that uses other translations to determine how words should continue to be translated, according to Iskander’s letter.

“Unfortunately many sources on the web use the translation you have seen,” Iskander wrote.

Al-Jamil agreed that the term is not unusual in Arabic.

“‘Luti,’ while pejorative, is also very common,” Al-Jamil said. “It could have easily been found.”

Kassab confirmed that the terms for gay and lesbian have been changed to the non-pejorative “misli jinsiyan” and “misliya,” respectively.

Although the problem has been corrected, even nuanced mistakes in translating languages can have serious implications if left uncorrected, Al-Jamil said.

“I think that the translation that existed before could have subtle, but far-reaching and dangerous consequences,” Al-Jamil said. “For example, if someone wanted to translate ‘Gay people march in New York City’ and received the equivalent of ‘Sodomites march in New York City’ in Arabic. … The translation would have the following effects: it would make the translator seem unnecessarily biased, it would reaffirm existing discrimination in the Arabic language, and anyone who reads the article would come away with a negative view of gay people. At first, translation might seem trivial, but it really isn’t.”