latest Apple TV Commercial uses word considered racist in Italy
 

Racist Apple Ad

I thought this was impossible, but it seems to be true. :confused:

yeow. reminds me of the story about coca-cola from a decade or two back: apparently, when they translated their 'Coke adds Life' adverts into spanish, they used a word that meant (in colloquial Mexican) 'sexual excitement'. I suspect their sales went up, though.

Hum. I don't know from colloquial Mexican, but I'm wondering whether that should be "can mean, when taken the wrong (right) way". Many words in all languages carry a variety of meanings, not to mention innuendo. For example, we have things called user names here, and the manual for an iPhone would probably talk about the user. But -- but -- but "user" means drug addict! Believe it or not, I actually had that objection to a text from a client, who was furious with me. So in general, be cautious about such claims, although the Terrone thing does seem well-founded.

On the other hand....

From the article: "Are you telling me that the prime time TV ad for a $100 billion dollar corporation is not vetted and checked before airing to millions of people?" Well, as a practising translator, I have no problems whatsoever with that negative hypothesis. :rolleyes:

Barbara Michelson of snopes.com has used the same argument: based not, as is her wont, on the facts out there but on a mere supposition about how corporations approach language. (For a recent governmental example of how things are actually done, look at Clinton's "reset button".)

First, you don't use the best talent, as it costs too much. You have dollars to spend on images and cents on language. By all means use your daughter, she was an au pair for six months and speaks the lingo! Second, if you do use the best talent and they tell you not to do something, you ignore them.

Calling BS. Apple didn't use it, Urbanspoon just turned it up. It's the restaurant owner's fault for naming his restaurant after a derogatory italian term.

Move along.

Indeed, the composer Edvard Grieg once complained that his German publisher "used a cheap translator rather than a good one".

On the other hand, there are many fabulous instances of "something gained" (unintentionally) in translation.

Similar ones:

"Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" in Chinese means "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead"

Most people know that the Chevy Nova allegedly means "No Go" in Spanish (Novas sold quite well in central/south America). "Pinto" (Ford) in Portugese is a slang term for a man's part.

IKEA make a workbench named "Fartfull" - Fährt of course means travel in Germanic languages (including Swedish)

Hoover (vacuum cleaners) make the Cyclone. Great name for a vacuum, 'cept in German its the "Zyklon" - would have been a good name if it wasn't for that nastyness in the 1940s with a similarly-named insecticide.

Similarly, "Nothing sucks like Electrolux" just doesn't work everywhere.

In Japan (where I live) the symbol 卍 is a map marker for temples*, and appear all over maps of places like Kyoto. The maps look very much like WWII maps of Europe....

The Pokemon (also Japanese) collector's card series of course included the temple marker......... :rolleyes:

* and yes, the Nazi version goes the other way.

Just what you need in the Easter holiday.....

See Snopes for that one, it's classified as an urban legend.

Wasn't that the one that exploded on contact? :D

"Fart" is indeed pan-Scandinavian for travel or speed (please reduce your fart now) but "fartfull" doesn't sound right to me. Sure about this one?

The cars thing: do you have a Honda or something called the Fitter in the US? We call it something else here, as "fitte" is rude Norwegian for the female pudenda. Oops.

I suspect that some funny car names result from a computer check for obscenities in all the world's thousands of languages. When I drove a Yaris, I never did manage to find out what it meant, and wondered whether it was randomly generated to be innocuous everywhere. If you know this word in Japanese, I'd be interested to hear!

Nothing came out, alas. Or did you mean the swastika?

It sure is. (hence "allegedly")

It sure is.

On several sites incl. Wikipedia, no longer in the IKEA catalog. Surely Ikea's product names aren't meant to make sense? (their assembly instructions certainly don't)

Dont, but Nissan makes a "March" domestically. I always wonder what happened to the 2 previous models.

Yes, I did. Post edited for clarity.

What, "Amble" and "Stroll"? ;)

"January" and "February"

Had to think about that for a bit :)

Mad TV did a take on the Terminator - he goes back to 30 AD and protects Jesus from the Romans / Judas etc. As Jesus is dragging the cross to Golgotha he says "Don't worry, He'll be back."

That guy needs to get a life. So much angst over a company not knowing every single obscure derogatory term in every language so they can avoid showing them?
Especially when they didn't actually use the word, but merely showed the name of a legitimate restaurant.

Why do people feel the need to go out of their way to find outrage and offense?

Now there’s a reason for angst! ;)
Hope you didn’t take offense, Jasen. :D

Well, the real question I have, is who cares? You think Apple wants to discriminate against people? No, Apple wants every person in the world to give them money, they are a company.

When did the world become such a bunch of cry babies? I mean obviously we are all human, and are prone to make mistakes. Being deliberately racist is one thing, doing it out of ignorance is easily forgivable in my book.

I, a few years ago, was trying to learn British slang, which is damn near impossible if you are from the states, because it doesn't make any sense. Well, it does make sense in some ways, you just got to understand the logic. I am sure I got lots of it wrong if not most of it, and I am sure I probably threw in a derogatory phrase here or there on accident and did not know it.

Get over it

You dirty terrone! :D

I was once entertaining some corporate guests from Britain, one of them an older lady. We were out in the courtyard, and this green helicopter comes screaming by and interrupted us. I offhandedly said, "I wonder if that's a military chopper." The woman looked at me with a look I can only describe as horror.
Later, one of the younger guys from their group whispers to me, "eh mate, in England 'chopper' means 'pussy'. I don't think she knows it's not the same here."
Oh, that was embarrassing.

On another note, my favorite cuss words ever are Jamaican. I dated a Jamaican girl for a while, and every time she got mad and started cussing somebody I just couldn't help but crack up. It's an entertaining language.

When I was a kid my dad would always swear in Dutch. Something along the lines of "hop for a domma domma do". I still have no idea what it meant.

Unfortunately, there are people - like Hal Licino in the linked post above - who live for the opportunity to take offense and cry out that they have been wronged. That post is dripping with so much hyperbole and melodrama that I struggled to finish reading it.

Another example of this kind of premeditated agitation came to light recently with the release of the movie adaptation of José Saramago's novel Blindness. The National Federation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind both condemned the movie, claiming that it portrayed blind people as uncivilized animals. In their haste and desire to take offense, they completely missed the point of the movie. The movie is not about blind people but rather an entire society of sighted people who are suddenly afflicted with blindness. If anything, the movie highlights how well blind people adapt in a society that is so inherently visual in nature by showing how poorly equipped society is to handle the loss of sight. Amazingly, people can find a way to take even a compliment as an insult!

Two countries separated by a single language...
 

True story: Some years ago a good friend of mine (a British girl) had just started university in the USA. Attending a lecture by one of her professors, she was taking notes with pencil. At one one point she makes a mistake, turns around to the girl behind her and ask:

"Pardon me, but may I borrow your rubber, please?"

.
On the other hand, I was at a party in England arranged by an Orthodox friend. He was introducing me, the newcomer, to everyone. At one point he says:

"This is John. He’s black."

John, of course, stood there with a huge grin. It was obviously an in joke, as if no one noticed.

Now this was some 25 years ago. I suspect that if it was a company party today, and it was the States, and the manager was doing the introductions, he would probably be sacked.

Heck, give me Lenny Bruce!

Eh, mate, it don't. In my day, anyway, it meant the opposite piece of equipment. Which is why bikers riding choppers was always funny.

One of the classic Anglo-American contretemps is when the British smoker in the US expresses a need for a ***.

Well, I don't know if the kid was confused himself then, or just playing with me. Still embarrassing no matter which gender's naughty bits it references.

I believe the correct word is "sex", though oddly that word seems to have offended enough people to the point that the incorrect substitution of "gender" is now commonplace...

How is gender not the correct word when talking about the traits of a particular sex?

The word gender applies to the cultural traits of a particular sex. In contrast, sex applies to the biological traits.

Example 1: Jamie is a woman [sex] whose friends say she her inability to ask for directions makes her very masculine [gender].

Example 2: Jamie has never let her sex influence her behavior in the office no matter how much her co-workers believe she should fit the stereotype of her gender.

Sadly, this is one of those concepts that is dying as time goes by. More and more 'sex' is just shorthand for 'sexual intercourse'. So the word 'gender' is taking over what 'sex' used to mean. Someone needs to come up with a new word, or feminist discussions are going to get really really hard...

(PS-- Example 2 is pretty funny when we use the new colloquial term...)

According to Merriam-Webster, gender is the behavioral, cultural or physiological traits associated with one sex. Maybe I'm not getting the nuances here.

I can see how in technical or scientific communication, the difference would be important, for accuracy's sake, but in common conversational usage, those words really have become virtually interchangeable.

Can you provide a more detailed source? The version of the definition given in this online version of merriam-webster says something different from what you quoted...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender

That is exactly what I was bemoaning - what I assume is misplaced prudishness about the word "sex" has led to the incorrect useage of "gender" becoming commonplace - it has been going on for some time, but recently, I have even seen the "M" and "F" checkboxes on forms listed under the heading "Gender".

I know, it's a losing battle and the language, etc. will go on evolving whether I approve or not, but for now, I think "gender" is still considered incorrect. In terms of "wrong" becoming "right" by virtue of common useage making it the de facto standard, it doesn't bother me as much as, say IE once did, or cheap calculators not obeying "order of operations" but I do notice whenever I see it...

Perhaps Jasen just incorrectly read or typed the word psychological as physiological?

As I understand it, there are some who claim that not only "gender" but also "sex" is socially constructed, that there is no bodily subject behind the roles. In other words, that there is no such thing as different male and female physiology, neurology and consequent psychology. This is part of the culture wars, part of the assault on science. If everyone actually believed that, we should maybe go extinct; which would be a good thing, as it would reduce the sum total of idiocy in the universe.

Well damn, I think I did. I could have sworn that link said physiological.
Perhaps I need to see an optometrist. :)

Yes, I see your point now.
Sex is the body, gender is the mind. So a homosexual, for instance, can be one sex but have the opposite gender.

Well, no. A male homosexual is not usually socially-constructed as of the "female gender". Nor do I think he ought to be so socially-constructed unless he wants to be. Some homosexuals seem to be what we might call hypermale, and I don't think these have any desire to be or seem female. The sex/gender distinction is more relevant to those people who seem to themselves to be trapped in the wrong body, those who are born with a female mind in a male body (it is rarely the other way round). I believe such people are called transgendered, which seems to me to be a contradictory usage. For if the body is sex and the mind is gender, they only have the one gender, which is female, although their bodies are male.

The point of all this is that the human sexes are not as simple as we are led to believe, even physiologically. By no means everyone is born with wholly neat and tidy "his and hers" equipment. The default human being is female, and to make a male a lot of embryological development has to be done just so, and can easily go wrong. Especially if the mother is stressed during her pregnancy; there was a darn good reason why everyone used to make her spend the months in peace and quiet.

I said "can", not necessarily is.
I know several transvestites here, which is what I thought of. They truly do act like women in men's bodies. I don't particularly care for the term "transgender" in that case either.

This statement, while not strictly incorrect, is very misleading. To say that the default human embryo is female is correct. A male embryo will not develop without the presence and activation of a couple of genes on the Y chromosome. If those genes are present, but don't activate, then the resulting fetus, if viable, will be genetically male while physiologically female. However, this is a very rare occurrence, and in general it is no less complicated to make a female fetus than it is to make a male fetus.

This is not to be confused with some other species (some fish and some insects), where the egg develops into a female in the absence of sperm from a male. In these species, the girls don't have fathers!