A few weeks ago we giggled when we realized that the name of the virtual personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S vaguely sounds like a Japanese term for "buttocks ," but now we're just shaking our heads in disappointment as yet another tech company stumbles its way through the product naming process. How on earth did smartphone maker Nokia not realize that the names of its latest devices — the Lumia and the Lumia — happen to match a colloquial term for "prostitute" in Spanish?
Now, I am — despite what some frequently seem to assume based on my given name — not a native Spanish speaker, so I had to consult a handful of dictionaries to confirm that this awkward translation was accurate after hearing about it on Twitter. The squeaky clean reference texts sitting on my bookshelf were of no help, but that wasn't surprising — they fail to include most slang terms.
According to its online dictionary , "lumia" is a synonym for "prostituta. And in case you're wondering whether "prostituta" just happens to sound similar to the English term for a lady of the night, let's set things straight :. Google's clever book-searching tool pulls up a German text called "Der Gitanismo im spanischen Argot" by a fellow named Bernhard Helzle-Drehwald.
The title loosely translates as "The Gypsy in Spanish slang. It is not a particularly commonly used term and only appears in Spanish dialects with heavy Gypsy influences. This may explain why the folks at Nokia did not realize that they were giving their latest products an awkward name, but I still don't see it as an excuse - someone should've cracked open an etymology book or twenty at some point during the product naming process and researched things.
Could Nokia really have failed to do this basic research? Or, if we want to get conspiratorial here, might its marketers have recognized the value of what would be an easily predictable flurry of press attention? Welcome regulars and passersby.
There, indeed, was a direct translation of "lumia" as "prostituta. This suggested that "lumia" has gypsy roots and that, therefore, the word tends only to occur in places that have a deep gypsy background. I performed my own little research. I asked five Spanish speakers whether they had heard of the word. For each, it was a first. This is not statistically significant. AWS Deloitte Genpact. Events Innovation Festival. Follow us:. By Laurel Sutton 4 minute Read.
And Nokia knew about that meaning before it launched the name, having done their due diligence, both from a trademark and linguistic perspective, as described on the Nokia blog : Then experts in 84 dialects started work, checking for any negative associations in different languages and assessing how easy they are to pronounce. Design Co. Design BeMe is an insurance-backed TikTok for mental health. What could possibly go wrong?
0コメント