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WF-EN4Q3U

WeChat’s Machine Translation Gave a Racist English Translation for the Chinese Term for “Black Foreigner”

The Chinese platform WeChat provided an inappropriate and racist English translation for the Chinese term for “black foreigner” in its messaging app.

Date it happened
2017-10-10
Organisation involved
WeChat
Where this came from
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Attribution

This incident was imported from AI Incident Database and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.

This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.