Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry nearly found himself in diplomatic hot water after Elon Musk’s X social media platform deployed an automatic translation feature that drastically scrambled the identities of visiting foreign dignitaries, the Jakarta Globe reported on Friday.
Trade Minister Ryosei Akazawa told reporters in Tokyo that the machine-translation tool repeatedly altered his official posts to suggest he did not know the names of the world leaders sitting across from him.
A Blunder Over Bangladesh
The translation failures began on October 28, when Akazawa published a Japanese-language post detailing a meeting with visiting Bangladeshi Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. While the original text and accompanying photographs correctly identified Rahman, the platform’s automatic English translation substituted the name of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s former premier who fled to India following a mass uprising in 2024.
Raising Diplomatic Alarms
Akazawa emphasized the gravity of the mishap during his briefing with journalists. This is actually a serious matter,
Akazawa said, adding that it is possible that…the Bangladeshi public might be left with the impression that Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry does not even know who our (Bangladeshi) prime minister is.
A Pattern of Faulty Translations
The Bangladeshi mix-up was not an isolated incident. Akazawa revealed he experienced similar errors on three separate occasions on the platform. Following a Thursday online meeting with Kuwait’s oil minister, Tareq Al-Roumi, the automatic translation tool claimed he had held discussions with Qatar’s energy minister instead. Another mistranslation occurred on a post concerning talks with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The Formal Appeal to X
Faced with a hat-trick of diplomatic translation errors, Akazawa formally appealed to X to fix the faulty tool.
