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WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

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

#211

Post by protomyth »

ecesena wrote: post #103
protomyth wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which brings us to the second part of naming things. I wouldn't tell someone in NASCAR country that 88 means a nazi salute unless you really want to offend.

Exactly -- we want to do a healthy/educational thing, imagine our surprise knowing that...

I guess I would say the bad meaning of 88 is not very relevant and certainly shouldn't stop a company operating in Asia from using it. Heck, a golf company using 88 would mean double snowmen rather than any dark meaning beyond a bad score.

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

#212

Post by pluma »

sovok wrote: post #12
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

Or wix.com, which sounds like wichs in German (wank).

The amazing thing about wix.com is that they went all-out with their marketing in Germany and embraced the phonetic similarity.

I'm not sure what audience they're aiming for by having the ads consist of people explaining that (and how) they wank -- with the obvious "twist ending" where they make it clear they're referring to using their product rather than masturbating. But I guess anyone turned off their product by the "racy" ads likely would have avoided it because of the name in the first place.

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

#213

Post by tomc1985 »

Abraln wrote: post #131
gus_massa wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One detail to consider about Spanish is that each country has it local variation, so there are some words that are totally safe in some countries but have a totally different unwanted meaning in others. For example "coger" means "pick" in Span and "fuck" in Argentina. (If you say it in Argentina with a Spanish accent the you will not get into troubles, but the people will give a subtle weird look and someone will exp…

It's definitely very important to realize that Spanish-speaking countries, while nominally speaking the same language, are very different. Spain has an entire verb tense that is not in Mexican Spanish. And unconfirmed example I have heard is pico de gallo. In Mexican Spanish it means something that's not too dissimilar from salsa, yet in some parts of South America, pico means penis. I heard there was an issue with a…

It's not just Spain either... Chile uses 'vosotros' as a sort-of-weird version of 'tu' (with some dropped sounds) e.g. 'como estas?' becomes 'como estai?' and sounding like 'como etai?'

Also: tire / tire shop: llanata / llanteria (mexico), neumatico / (tienda de) vulcanizacion (chile). Corn: maiz (mexico), choclo (chile). Car: coche (mexico), auto (chile). etc etc etc

(I'm not latin, I just like traveling there, so dont take the above as gospel :)

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

#214

Post by tomc1985 »

JorgeGT wrote: post #146
mrleinad wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searched several spanish words, nothing was found. I guess no support for spanish yet?

I added the infamous case of the Mitsubishi PAJERO :P

what about the Chevy NOVA?

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

#215

Post by sandworm101 »

pluma wrote: post #209
personlurking wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't 'mist' like 'darn' in English?

"Darn" is a minced oath. Mist, simply means "crap" or "manure". A pile of manure is called "Misthaufen" (crap heap), a pitchfork for handling manure is called "Mistforke" or "Mistgabel" (crap fork). It's a bit vulgar but so is the subject matter. But you can also use it as a general expression of discontent: "Mist!" is something you might exclaim if you just dropped something expensive and fragile. It's still vulgar…

Man, don't put "dumb" anywhere near "retarded". I don't want another literal user for a word (retarded=delayed, dumb=mute) to disappear in the name of political correctness.

To quote from TGOTG: "This dumb tree, he is my friend." Groot is dumb because his is effectively a mute. Drax was not commenting in any way on his intelligence.

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

#217

Post by kinow »

There's a company here in New Zealand called RaboDirect. Rabo means "tail" in Portuguese (and in Spanish maybe?). But it can also mean arse or ass. In most cases I'd think people were talking about arses than about tails. This was not caught by wordsafety :/

Not sure if you are breaking up words. I remember a friend told me about some algorithm that works for that, and is used by German linguists... not exactly stemmers, but there was another thing that could be useful too.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! Looking great.

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

#218

Post by foldr »

schoen wrote: post #188
foldr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spain has an entire verb tense that is not in Mexican Spanish. Are you sure you mean tense? The verb has an additional form in each tense because of vosotros, but there are no additional tenses so far as I know.

It would probably be most accurate to say that it's an extra person. Verbs can be inflected in various languages for gender, number, person [which can include degrees of formality, respect, or social distance], voice, mood, tense, aspect, ergativity [an alternative to voice], evidentiality [how the speaker knows that the thing happened], and other things I'm probably forgetting.

Yes, I know. As far as I know, Mexican Spanish has all the same tenses as European Spanish but lacks a second person familiar plural, and hence the associated form of the verb in each tense.

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

#219

Post by avar »

I looked up "Bora". No results. The Volkswagen Bora was somewhat famous in Iceland because "Bora" means "Anus". You could drive the Volkswagen Anus! The vendor went out of its way to mispronounce the name in their TV ads as "Bóra", which would be like pronouncing "Anus" as "Aneece" or something like that.

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

#220

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

timpark wrote: post #123
pavlov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Honestly, the code for that sucks. It just looks for specific variations of letter combinations. I guess a more robust approach would try to build up a real phonetic representation of the word, then apply various languages' orthographic rules to that to check for matches.

I'm no expert on phonetic matching, but a product I worked on many years ago used Soundex. (It's meant for English pronunciation, so you'd have to research other languages) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Soundex is optimized for collapsing the spelling of names into a common key and isn't so hot for general words. Metaphone would be a more useful matching algorithm. It also preserves a legible spelling so that you can pass the result onto further fuzzy matching stages like an edit distance measure.

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

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