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WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

wordsafety.com

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Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#52

Post by elros »

djrogers wrote: post #42
elros wrote: post #22

I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Things like, the nonexistent English word "bocket" sounding like Brazilian slang for blowjob ("boquete"), but only when spoken the way a Brazilian would. I think this cross-pronouncing thing would actually be harder to tackle: It's more important to try to match the way users on their home locale would say the foreign term, than the way the for…

The lack of phonetic matching is a problem - the most (in?)famous example of this was the Chevy Nova, which phonetically sounds like 'doesn't go' in spanish.

Regarding the Chevy Nova, I always found that story very hard to believe. While it may seem plausible for someone who does not speak Spanish, someone who does would quickly note the fact that "no va" is pronounced /no'βa/ (stress on the second syllable) while Nova would be pronounced /'no.βa/ (stress on the first syllable).

These two sounds would not be perceived by a Spanish speaker as being the same.

Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#53

Post by [deleted] »

djrogers wrote: post #42
elros wrote: post #22

I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Things like, the nonexistent English word "bocket" sounding like Brazilian slang for blowjob ("boquete"), but only when spoken the way a Brazilian would. I think this cross-pronouncing thing would actually be harder to tackle: It's more important to try to match the way users on their home locale would say the foreign term, than the way the for…

The lack of phonetic matching is a problem - the most (in?)famous example of this was the Chevy Nova, which phonetically sounds like 'doesn't go' in spanish.

[deleted]

Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#54

Post by pavlov »

aladdinw wrote: post #28
pavlov wrote: post #25

Hey guys, I made this last week as a two-evening side project. Happy to see it posted here, thanks randall! I know the word lists aren't complete. This was the best I could do given the time constraint, the fact that I don't actually speak 19 languages... And also, after two evenings of googling dirty words, I started feeling like I'm about to acquire Tourette's in some unknown language ;) I'll update the database wi…

I will be happy to help with arabic words

Don't hesitate to submit on the site, it's very welcome! (I'm going to vet them manually when I have a moment.)

Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#56

Post by schoen »

ludamad wrote: post #20
maartenscholl wrote: post #5

I think this should also do a phoneme based comparison, for example the photo sharing website Flickr is pronounced like this word (as a slang word it is well known) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flikker

Do you know of any high-quality phonemic dictionaries?

There is such a thing for English, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.

Very, very useful, although specific to American English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Pronouncing_Dictionary

I've succeeding in using it to solve puzzles that had to do with how words were pronounced, as opposed to how they were spelled.

Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#58

Post by vitd »

maartenscholl wrote: post #24

"expertsexchange" only matches the Chinese “cha”, and not "sex" or "sexchange".

Yeah, it seems like it either doesn't match english words (probably because it assumes you already speak English since it's an English-language web site), or it is only looking for specific types of matches (swear words, etc.). I tried merder.com, since I know that "merde" is french for "shit" and it sounds like "murder.com". It caught "merde", but didn't catch "murder". I then tried "murder.com" and it was like, "Yep! Looks good! Go for it!" (I may be paraphrasing.)

Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

#60

Post by cossatot »

sanbor wrote: post #50

Tried the Spanish word "pajero" (usually translated to "wanker" or "tosser"). Mitsubishi named a car "Pajero" and they had to change the name to "Montero" in Spanish speaking countries. Another unfortunate car name is Suzuki Moco. This word neither appears in this app. "Moco" means "snot" or "booger" in Spanish.

I have found it's important when emailing/texting in Spanish to put the tilde in 'año', when I normally wouldn't bother with an American keyboard.
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