Good to know English speaking Americans aren’t racist, they are just language dumb-fcuks!
The Guardian headline “Amazon hits trouble with Sweden launch over lewd translation”
“Products featuring cats were hit particularly hard, with the lewd double meaning of the word ‘pussy’ leading to a T-shirt with a cat on it being labelled with an (sic) vulgar Swedish term for “vagina”.”
“…genius decision of doing garbage machine translation for 95+% of the site…”
And all this time I thought that Anglo-Americans were racist because they got their buddy who took 4 years of HS Spanish to translate their corporate documents, customer messaging and PSAs from English, instead of using a professional translator. Here is an example from a PSA on BART, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
- Why not translate the phrase “are diagnosed” into Spanish? If it is not necessary in Spanish why is it necessary in English?
- “carrier” is better translated as “vector de transmisión”
- “de el”?
- “No existe cura.”? “There is no priest.”? “No hay remedio.”!
- Why not translate “that affects the respiratory, digestive and reproductive systems.” into Spanish? If Spanish speakers don’t need to know that why do English-speakers?
- “casi 47” means “almost 47”. Use either “aproximadamente 47” or “más o menos 47”.
Good to know that corporate America has the same dismissive attitude towards Swedish as they do towards Spanish! Counters one point of evidence that they are racists.
