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How 8 Pixels Cost Microsoft Millions
NubKnacker writes "Economic Times, one of India's biggest business daily's is carrying a story about how a small colouring mistake forced Microsoft to recall 200,000 copies of Windows 95. This wouldn't be the first time that has happened to Microsoft. From the article, "Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation." Ouch!"
please keep in mind the 'bitch' problem is from people in central america using the SPANISH (IE, DESTINED FOR SPAIN) version of the OS...
its not microsofts fault that people in central america, use an OS destined for ANOTHER COUNTRY, and their words overlap into profanity.
anything to bash MS, eh slashdot?
This is not only a duplicate, it's a poorly written rip-off of the other article. While the other article (in the Register, I believe), was obviously anti-Microsoft, this tabloidish piece doesn't even fully explain the stories.
Its India, for having weird anti-free-speech laws that ban inadvertent mistakes or differing opinions. What kind of crap is that? In the US and probably most other free western countries I could publish software that says India is part of China and that the US owns Kashmir. Just nobody would use it. on the other hand, in the US, most folks wouldn't know the difference. and yes its a dupe.
I can't speak Spanish, but I have been told by a person from Brazil that one of the words for "girl" in European Portuguese becomes "bitch" in Brazilian Portuguese. It is most likely that this is the same situation: a matter of the word's usage changing in other regions that speak that language.
Best Microsoft Executive Quote Ever: "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world."
I would love to work for a company who's opinion about me is that I only have a hazy idea about the rest of the world. If it's true, however, it explain a lot, like the security issues in Windows.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Clearly not everyone believes Snopes, because I found both the "pinto/penis" and the "nova/no go" stories mentioned here, here, and here. All cite the same usual suspects, so who can tell which are true, and which are false. However, the BBC does mention the "pinto" story here. We all know the BBC never makes anything up...
My friend Zaulo was here this weekend helping me re-arrange my office, and we were discussing this exact story (thankfully this is a dupe, so I've had a chance to get some Local Color betweent the first and second postings!)
File this under "the Spanish-speaking world is big. Really Big.". In Locale esMX macho and hembra are commonly used for animals, meaning male and female respectively.
When applied to humans, they take on the connotation of "super manly" (a usage that is common in US English) and "extremely feminine and beautiful" ... (a usage that seems not to have found its way to the US).
In some Latin American coutnries, the usage ranges from decidedly negative to merely curious.
There was a similar story that made the headlines for a while, that some beer company had a series of commercials where all of the characters were referring to each other as "güey" (pronounced "way", like "do you know the way to san jose?") , which in esMX is the closest translation possible to "dude." In some other locales it is much more rude.
The word is, in fact, a variant on the word buey (Ox) which is a very crude insult, likely leading to physical assault.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
The region isn't disputed by India and Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan "know" that the territory belongs to them. It's just a matter of convincing everyone else that they are right.
Beware of the source. I came across another article from their site earlier this morning and I'm perplexed as to how they can be considered a credible news source. Check out their article on programmers outsourcing their own jobs if you need a good laugh. They took a comment that was posted on Slashdot awhile back from some guy who was joking about how he had outsourced his own job to India and not only did they treat this guy's post as a reliable news source, but they also extrapolated it into claims of this practice being the hot new trend. It's quite bizarre. I wish I could find the original comment because I remember reading it and laughing at the time, but Google isn't turning it up for some reason.
One thing Snopes fails repeatedly to take into account is that people in other cultures have a sense of humor. They drop the "Fix It Again Tony" (Fiat) comparison that's been an endless running joke for Americans, but don't realize that "No Va" was basically the same thing. No, those silly Spanish people didn't think Nova literally meant "Doesn't Run." It was an often-told, well travelled joke.
This whole dig against Americans should probably be on Snopes. The fact that there is a very large percentage of Americans who are immigrants or first-generation Americans makes the whole argument incredibly silly. The reason it is so popular is because people in other countries know a ton about what is going on in the US but people in the US don't usually know much of what is going on in those other countries.
I do training and I get a similar experience. Everybody knows me from the classes. They know my name, they know my little anecdotes, and they know my interests. Unfortunately haven't trained hundreds of people it is almost impossible for me to remember even all of their names. Likewise, If you live in Uzbekistan you might know a lot about the US but how much can you expect an American to know about the sentencing of terrorist bombers.
IIRC the translation they used was "hembra", that is a good translation of female (as far as a dictionary goes), but it's normally only used when referring to female animals. I think it was in Republica Dominicana (might be wrong) that "hembra" was slang for "bitch" (here in Venezuela it wouldn't have been as bad)
No idea, but you'll notice that Hayao Miyazaki's movie "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" has been renamed to just "Castle In The Sky" by Disney in order not to offend their Spanish speaking market. see
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This is the *third* time this story has been posted :).
How about if Slashdot gave compensation to all us subscribers when their editors screw up again?
Here is one example:
http://shock-awe.info/archive/000858.php/
Granted it is not the most coherant example, but I do not have the time right now to go digging through google looking for examples of snopes being wrong.
I am not sure how scopes could be right or wrong
If they say that something is False when in reality that thing is True then snopes is wrong.
Is geographic ignorance confined to the United States? Or is that geographic ignorance?
For the record, I'm a citizen of the United States, and I know where Canada, Montana, North Dakota, and Kashmir are. I also know that it doesn't make a lot of sense to refer to being "north" of a border that runs north-south, as the Montana-North Dakota border does.
Also, I think Canada should be called "Canadia." Isn't that a cooler sounding name? And I think Nepal should be moved a little bit to the left (west on my North America centric maps). I think robots are stealing my luggage. I think all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary people in the country are fed up with being sick and tired. I am certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
(Portions stolen without permission from Steve Martin and the Monty Python group).
Anyways, for the record, I know not only the states of the union, but the Provinces of Canadia (although I couldn't tell you the name of a single current Canadian office holder), and the capitals of Oregon, Ontario, and Quatar.
Surely there are much better things to belittle the United States about than our geography skills? Like our electoral college...
For example, cojer means "to pick up", but in mexico it means "to have sexual relations with". You can swing by to cojer your friends in most countries, but your Mexican buddies will probably object. (Acutally, I don't don't know if this is true for Northern Mexico, not having been there). There are literally thousands of similar examples -- be very careful asking shop keepers if they have eggs!
Since the language is extremely variable over even short geographic distances, it would be VERY difficult to provide Spanish-Language versions of your software that didn't offend someone.
For the record, I believe the word in question here is "hembra" - which means "female" most places, but can be derogatory in others.
It's ultimately a management problem. I wouldn't expect the average programmer anywhere in the world (other than e.g. India) to know these things, but "head of geopolitical strategy" of the world's largest software company better damn know these "details". It's his job to know these things and make sure the programmers know what to do and what not to do, and frankly, for someone in that position, these are not "basic" mistakes, they're huge, stupid mistakes. I mean, you'd think if you're selling millions of copies of some software system for a country as big as India, that you'd at least do some basic testing and liasing with actual Indians before going to press with the CDs. Microsoft are not new at exporting software, and they're not new to evaluating all the specific laws pertinent to specific countries and ensuring compliance with them - they don't just 'translate and ship' - so to miss something this huge and this basic is just inexcusably bad management.
(That said, Americans are, on average, more ignorant of the "rest of the world" than just about anyone else, but yes, that is probably besides the point here. Let's face it, Microsoft don't just miss "obscure details" like these: they still make the mistake of *globally* announcing *global* software releases as being "this fall" or "this summer" - for such a 'global' company, it's incredible that ignorance of such basic things is rife from top to bottom and in every corner of the entire organization.)
When I used to work at IBM in "Usability", and icons had to approved by many different national offices. I had heard that a group was making a icon that resembled a tree for an imaging product. It seemed pretty generic, but IBM Japan rejected it, saying simply "No mushroom clouds, please." The icon was redesigned, and I understand there were very few complaints about the process after that.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
I wouldn't think this would be easily mistaken - the words are completely different, just as they are in English.
Perra is a female dog, or "bitch" (while a Perro is a male dog)
Female is Hembra (and Hombre is man).
Anyone with a few hours of formal Spanish can probably tell you those (I've had no formal Spanish, myself, just a few hours of self learning and I can tell you, if that says anything).
Actually they didn't put the word 'bitch' in as such. They just a word which means genuinely means woman in most spanish speaking countries, but in a few others actually is used as an insult meaning bitch.
i hate to break this to you, but there is no dialect in french in which that means "you're a cunt." furthermore, it's "reprendre à l'école."
_la_ école?
And that's an accute accent, not a circumflex.
Maybe you shouldn't have been doing the French translation in the first place!