Error in translation



  • Chinese translation error blamed for slur on sofa label

    So what's the greater WTF:

    the Chinese translation software?

    the woman filing a complaint with a human rights commission? (I'm not blaming the woman for feeling offended, but this seems a little much)

    the woman not realizing that a Chinese worker wouldn't have caught the error?

    the furniture company for not (apparently) trying to understand her position?  (As a customer service gesture, I would have offered some compensation) 

    (or any of the others that I didn't mention!)



  • I agree this is taking things a bit far.

    On the other hand did you notice the name of the spokesperson?

    "Commission spokeswoman Afroze Edwards"

    Someone is going to take issue with this name next, calling it a racial slur.



  • The real WTF surely is how distressed this woman claims her whole family were by a slightly offensive (only slightly as it was 100% accidental) error!

     



  • "I had friends over from St. Lucia yesterday and they wouldn't sit on the couch."

     

    I can fully agree! Oh wait, no I can't, the whole things is insanely ludicrous. Human rights complaints? Refusing to sit on a couch because of an unfortunate problem with some dodgy old translation software? Some people take this faaaar too seriously. Sure it's a mistake and probably should have been caught somewhere along the chain, but really....

    Personally I had a little chuckle when I read it. Not as much as a laugh as I get from the overly-PC folk though. "People of color"? What an absurd phrase. Calling people who've never even been outside the borders of the US "African Americans"? Hahaha comedy gold. Oh, you mean that's not a joke? Oh.
     



  • Wouldn’t it be funny if the same software was used to write fortune cookies?

     

    Although I've never got one that could really use the word 'dark-brown'. 



  • @RobbieAreBest said:

    Wouldn’t it be funny if the same software was used to write fortune cookies?

     

    Although I've never got one that could really use the word 'dark-brown'. 

    Maybe you go to a different [i]Asian American[/i] take-out than me?


  • This bullet point from the top of the article should clear things up:

    • Buyer is consulting with a lawyer and wants compensation

    In other words, the righteous indignation  and distress is pure BS.  This woman just saw an opportunity to make some money and jumped on it.



  • These kinds of cases always involve the person suing for emotional distress because they "couldn't sleep at night" and "suffered detriments to the quality of their personal, social, and professional lives."

    In other words, yeah, she's making a huge deal over nothing on purpose because she wants free money.  Throw out her case and make her pay the court costs IMO.



  • @Saladin said:

    Throw out her case and make her pay the court costs IMO.

     

    Exactly... This is going to do nothing more than cost the consumer more money...

    The companies will either have to settle or pay to defend themselves, and guess who they pass that cost along to?
     



  • Wasn't there some mess like this having to do with master and slave settings on IDE devices?

    In my experience, a lot of Chinese people are unfamiliar with the slur. This makes things difficult, because they just don't "get" gangster rap.
     



  • The term is used in other countries and it is not a racial slur to them.

    Granted some words might want to be replaced with less offensive ones when entering a country where they are widely known to be unacceptable.



  • @Saladin said:

    These kinds of cases always involve the person suing for emotional distress because they "couldn't sleep at night" and "suffered detriments to the quality of their personal, social, and professional lives."

    In other words, yeah, she's making a huge deal over nothing on purpose because she wants free money.  Throw out her case and make her pay the court costs IMO.

    IANAL, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night! (That, plus my wife really IS a lawyer): Don't worry, this case won't even make it to court. It'll settle for $500 + lawyer fees, maybe.  Emotional distress, contrary to stupid public opinion, is not something easy to prove or win any monetary judgement over except in extreme circumstances, and obviously this is not one of them.

    The real WTF is that not only is this woman a friggin' idiot, but she that she was able to find an attorney so unethical that they would even consider suing (if in fact she found a lawyer to take the case on) because any lawyer worth passing a bar exam *should* know that this is borderline unethical since they're probably only doing so to extract money for themselves from the situation, knowing there's little chance they could ever come close to making worth their client's time and money to pursue a lawsuit like this.  Again, I'm not a lawyer, but in seeing some of the truly WTF situations my wife describes to me on a weekly basis regarding clients and dumb-ass attorney's, I think it's relatively safe to make the assumptions I did that the lawyer in this case is where the big WTF lies.
     



  • @RayS said:

    Oh wait, no I can't, the whole things is insanely ludicrous. Human rights complaints? 

    The whole human rights complaint bothers me simply because there are real issues to deal with, not this crap.  It's not like the software company just blew her off; they apologized and are (apparently) going to fix the problem.
     

    @RayS said:

    Calling people who've never even been outside the borders of the US "African Americans"?

    A high school acquaintance was born in Mozambique, and applied for African-American college scholarships.  She's also white.  Apparently, she managed to get some of them even when they found out she was white because she is, by definition, African-American.



  • @bobday said:

    Wasn't there some mess like this having to do with master and slave settings on IDE devices?


     

     

    In Linux/UNIX, the KDE desktop environment uses "slaves", small programs/API's that are specialized in only ONE thing (ie. doing HTTP downloads). They are exactly what the name says, slaves: they just do their job, nothing else.

     

     And there are people which are bothered by it: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2075

     

    What Next?

     



  • I'm sure that the lawyers could turn it into a class-action lawsuit.  That would make it worth their while.

    Then, if there are 1000 plaintiffs, the settlements are always structured like this:

    • 1000 coupons for $100 off your next couch
    • $50,000 in cash.

    Let's see... how should we divvy this up?  How about each of you get a coupon, and a the lawyers get the cash. 

    Now, there's probably only about a 10% chance of any particular coupon being used.  And those few that are can easily be justified as 'advertising expense'.  It has, after all, landed the sale of a whole new couch.  (For a truly egregious offense such as this, I'm sure that the victim would be disinclined to buy from the same company next time, if not for the coupon!)

    Benefit to victims?  Miniscule.

    Effect on other consumers?  Increases cost of products so company can offset lawyer payout.

    I'm not an aggrieved party in this case.  But if it were me?...  I'd rather have an apology.



  • @RayS said:

    Calling people who've never even been outside the borders of the US "African Americans"?

    Or inside, for that matter. 





  • The real WTF is the whole PCness of everything. It just really offends me when someone says I can't use a word because it has some "offensive" meaning.

     We were told a while back, we couldn't use the word "black listed."



  • @chrismcb said:

    The real WTF is the whole PCness of everything. It just really offends me when someone says I can't use a word because it has some "offensive" meaning.

     We were told a while back, we couldn't use the word "black listed."

    But #000000listed is so much more catchy!


  • @RayS said:

    Calling people who've never even been outside the borders of the US "African Americans"?

    What's equally ridiculous is calling a citizen of another country who is visiting the US "African American".



  • @GettinSadda said:

    @chrismcb said:

    The real WTF is the whole PCness of everything. It just really offends me when someone says I can't use a word because it has some "offensive" meaning.

     We were told a while back, we couldn't use the word "black listed."

    But #000000listed is so much more catchy!

    ROFL



  • I read about a student in a Florida high school who was White and from South Africa.  They had some kind of contest for like, vote for your favorite African American in the school.  Of course he put posters up as a joke because he was literally "African American."  Long story short, the kid was expelled.

     

    In my high school history class there was a girl arguing with me about something and we were talking about Africa and the the Middle East.  Anyways she refered to black people in Africa as "African Americans," and my teacher just interrupted her in the middle of her sentence and said "African Americans?  I think they would prefer to just be called Africans."  I nearly died. 



  • @iwpg said:

    @RayS said:

    Calling people who've never even been outside the borders of the US "African Americans"?

    Or inside, for that matter. 

     
    And a person born and raised in America can be an "African America" but somebody like me, who was born in Iceland, is "white." Why are whites the only people it's appropriate to call by the color of their skin, anyway? I'm getting so tired of the "circle your race" lists that say things like: African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Native American, White.


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