By David Fortier
The superintendent of Bristol Public Schools apologized in an email sent to parents and faculty this weekend for a mistranslation of Arabic on signs promoting aschool-wide anti-hate. “I take full responsibility for the mistake,” Catherine Carbone, superintendent of schools, wrote in the email addressed to families and faculty of Bristol Public School students.
“I should have given it more attention to catch errors,” she wrote after explaining that the two A.I. systems or “multilingual neural machine services” were used for the translations.
The signs that were posted Friday were removed immediately when the problem was identified. New signs will be printed and posted, she said.
“Hate has no home in our All-Heart city and BPS,” the signs read in English. Below the English are translations in Spanish, Arabic and Polish.
The Arabic translation on the original signs is gibberish, according to sources that TBE consulted.
Carbone continues, “I will continue to work to ensure that all of our students, families and staff are respected, seen and heard.”
The anti-hate program was recently featured on the Mayor’s Office Facebook page. With racist and white supremacist activity in town on the increase–two swastikas have been found on or near Northeast Middle School and racist slurs written on a sidewalk at Rockwell Park recently–the program would appear to come in time to address these issues.
However, controversy over the incidents has ensured since the mayor has resisted a strong condemnation of the racist and white supremacist activities and insisted on focusing on a more generic approach using hate as the focus.
“It is important that we celebrate and respect each and every student, parent/guardian, administrator, teacher and staff member every day,” Carbone writes.
She closes her email with a note about how this message aligns with the Bristol Board of Education Core Values as outlined in the Bristol Public Schools Equity Statement.
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