Live data from Hacker News

WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

wordsafety.com

61–70 of 299 posts

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

#61

"bite" is safe according to this tool. Any french speaker does a double take when they see that word though, especially in certain sentences. For reference: https://askafrenchguy.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/petite-bites-... Edit: Yes, I have submitted it to the database, it should get vetted eventually. A crowdsourced process for the vetting could be fun too!

much less "bitenuker" which is highly offensive to those who speak either French or Dutch.

I'm Dutch and I know my offensive language. Never heard of that.

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

#62
Maybe it should include English words as well?

Beaver returns nothing

'caca' and 'pede' do return, so props for that

'bosta' matches but maybe Josta should?

'sharmuta' also matches (with a different spelling, but it's probably a variation)

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

#63
This falls into they "why bother" class of things for me. You're never going to catch `everything`, and this stuff almost always causes very broken edge cases for people.

I can't use my real last name at the apple genius bar last I checked because it's "offensive"...

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

#64
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.

US-Based native Spanish speaker here. Very important indeed, specially when asking someone their age :) Whenever the ñ is not available (foreign keyboards, mobile, etc...), a decent substitute is "anyo", which is phonetically equivalent and also happens to be the Ladino variant of the word.

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

#65
This seems like a nice idea, but many of the comments here are pointing to omissions that the people commenting feel could be serious.

I guess I see six kinds of potential difficulties:

① There are so many languages out there, including languages will millions of speakers who might eventually come across your thing. Maybe that's not an issue for tangible products that will be marketed to specific territories.

② There are so many slang terms out there; each individual language might well have thousands of terms that have a rude, sexual, or excretory meaning, or that are used as a slur against some group. Also, some languages have expletives that don't correspond to expletives in other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity

③ People have pointed out that phonetic matching is hard when you're dealing with different languages' orthographies and phonologies, and you can have the problem of "the source language's intended pronunciation sounds like an offensive word in the other language", "the other language's likely pronunciation of the written term sounds like an offensive word in the other language", or even other combinations among highly multilingual populations. "Sounds like" is sometimes challenging to automate in software, for example because epenthesis of a vowel may not be enough to remove the association. (But I think Levenshtein edit distance between phonemic transcriptions can kind of sort of work.)

Also, the "MR2" example someone gave shows that understanding how people will pronounce something in different languages is complicated: you have to know that the number two in French is "deux" /dø/.

④ People might also perceive something as an offensive reference that isn't even familiar to people elsewhere, like a reference to an upsetting person, place, or event. Reportedly some people in India have named people and businesses after Adolf Hitler just because he was famous, for example. I bet it's easy to do this cross-culturally in general.

⑤ As people point out with the Chevy Nova story, there might be a reason why a product name would become the target of ridicule in a particular language even if it's not offensive. That's true even if it didn't literally happen to the Chevy Nova.

⑥ It might even turn out that the space of offensive references is so dense that there is nothing that isn't a near-homophone of something pretty offensive in some language.

Anyway, I think this project is really neat; I'm just reminded from people's comments that natural language is hard! There's scope to keep expanding this site, and I think there are also existing "cultural consultant" businesses that try to deal with these problems through human review (I wonder how many of them have consultants on contract from many widely varying cultures, which seems especially useful in the Internet era).

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

#67

Maybe it should include English words as well? Beaver returns nothing 'caca' and 'pede' do return, so props for that 'bosta' matches but maybe Josta should? 'sharmuta' also matches (with a different spelling, but it's probably a variation)

Yes, it seems to be missing a fair bit of English slang, like "fanny", "root", "gigolo"...

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

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Spanish speaker would certainly notice that the two are similar and if they had the right sense of humor they'd intentionally mispronounce it.

EDIT: Though I'm apparently wrong and this is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

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

#69
Interesting, I recently found out that one of my usernames on a popular game means "shitman" in finnish or swedish, not through this site though (and it doesn't appear to bring anything up). Great idea though!

Also the word search field has an XSS, try entering "alert(1)". Not sure if it's a big deal but it's good to be safe.

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

#70
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]
Post reply on HN