Associated Incidents
On the 12th, NHK announced that it had found cases where the "Senkaku Islands" were displayed as the Chinese spelling "Diaoyu Islands" in its service, which provides live streaming of 24-hour English TV broadcasts on its website and app, and displays multilingual subtitles in real time using an AI-based automatic translation function. In response to this, the company announced that it would end its multilingual subtitle service using AI-based automatic translation.
[Photo] Former TBS announcer Hoshi Makoto, eldest daughter of former TBS announcer Mikumo, who was announced to continue as anchor of "News Watch 9"
The service uses Google's AI translation function (Google Translate API). It was provided with the message "This is an automatic translation" and "The translation may not be complete."
The problem occurred on the 10th of this month, when a 4pm news report featured China's reaction to the news of the Japan-US summit, a station employee discovered that the Chinese subtitles read "Diaoyu Islands in Okinawa Prefecture" and "Diaoyu Islands under Japanese control." The company decided that this was "not appropriate for an NHK service," and ended the service on the same day.
According to an NHK official, they are also looking back at the past week to see if there were any similar cases, and similar mistakes have already been confirmed in the past four days.
The multilingual subtitle service began in earnest in April 2020. It started with seven types in six languages, including Chinese, Spanish, and French. In March 2022, Ukrainian was added, increasing the number to nine languages and ten types.