Man accused of collecting money for Kurdish terrorist group breaks down after being confronted with text message that turned out to be harmless.

Copenhagen police have admitted to wrongly confronting a Kurdish man accused of financing terrorism with a text message that had been mistranslated by Google Translate, a free automated language translation service.

The man reportedly suffered a breakdown following the interrogation and his lawyer, Thorkild Høyer, called the use of Google Translate unacceptable in legal proceedings.

“But it is even more serious in a case involving allegations of terrorism, and in which the accused are being held on remand,” Høyer said.

Høyer said the Google-translated documents violate Danish laws preventing investigators from presenting people accused of crimes with false information, and he is demanding that all such documents be dismissed from the investigation.

The 50 year-old man is one of the eight Kurds arrested in September and accused of financing terrorism for collecting upwards of 140 million kroner on behalf of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is considered by the EU to be a terrorist organization.

“During the interrogation, the investigator used a Google-translated version of the contents of the text message and he should not have done that,” said Copenhagen police inspector Svend Foldager. “There is not much to say other than it was a mistake. I know only of this one instance and I’ve never heard of it happening before.”

The translation error was coincidentally discovered by a translator during the interrogation of the man. The Google Translate version of the message in Turkish read: “I call for a meeting.”

But according to Høyer, the message was a mass-invitation and part of a text-message chain without a personal sender.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation Inc.

See Also

• Machine or automated language translation is no substitute for professional human translation
  Machine translation may be sufficient for communicating via social networks, or getting the gist of a foreign language website. However, in itself it is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality.
• Police use of Google Translate 'mistake'
  Police officers in Denmark made a mistake when they used Google Translate on a text message while questioning a terrorism suspect, a spokesman says.