If only Miyazaki would have had this when he named Laputa: Castle in the sky
FWIW, he got the name from Jonathan Swift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa
Who... apparently didn't speak Spanish.
WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
231–240 of 299 posts
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#232I believe you can make a good use of http://www.urbandictionary.com/ to update your database, because there are also lot of foreign words, which you miss at the moment. (pula - Romanian for dick, fasz - Hungarian for dick, piča - Czech/Slovak for cunt, etc.)
They have an unofficial API[1] that could be used.
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#233No results found for this search. There's a reasonable chance that it's safe...
But you can never be quite sure. There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Somewhere deep in the Amazonian jungle, "anal" could be an insult that gets you killed.
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#234No results found for this search. There's a reasonable chance that it's safe... But you can never be quite sure. There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Somewhere deep in the Amazonian jungle, "anal" could be an insult that gets you killed.
not only that (incomplete coverage of languages) - words can also have phonetic similarities to vulgarities without the same spelling.
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#235It doesn't list the word "Belgium". Even though according to Douglas Adams that's the most offensive word in the galaxy. :)
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#236Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#237Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#238You'll have a real hard time with Slavic languages. ;)
Trying to add all the things you missed meanwhile.
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#239One of the most recent corporate mishaps I've learned of is Microsoft Nokia calling their phone "Lumia", when in Spain "lumi" or "lumia" is an informal word to mean "prostitute".
Your app doesn't reflect that. I was going to say that you need to source slang dictionaries, but this one is in the Diccionario de la Real Academia:
http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?val=lumia
And even in the first random online bilingual dictionary Google threw up:
http://diccionario.sensagent.com/lumi/es-en/
So maybe do a bit of scraping/spidering of multilingual dictionaries, starting with your collected list of bad words?
Re: WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
#240I saw this and immediately thought of an old story where General Motors tried to sell the Chevy Nova in South America. It hardly sold at all in South America even though it was a hugely popular car in North America. The reason turned out to be that "No va" in Spanish translates to "won't go" so GM was basically trying to sell a sporty car with a misleading name. Unfortunately this website wouldn't have helped GM sell…
For what it's worth, the "Nova" story is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
That was the first thing I attempted to search for and the output from the site is:
Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova".
It's a nice detail.