So a lady's daughter finds a tag on their brand new dark brown couch that describes the couch as "n*gger brown". No, it's not "nagger".
The culprit? Apparently, a Chinese manufacturer used an outdated dictionary to translate the color from Chinese to English. Apparently in this dictionary, the dark brown is translated as the n-word.
Anyone who has visited China, Japan, or most other Asian countries knows this type of thing happens all the time. Things are always mistranslated. There's a whole site dedicated to messed up English.
Even national monuments and World Heritage Sites have engraved plaques with horrendous English, so it doesn't surprise me that a random Chinese factory didn't check it's English carefully. There's no way for them to know. Even if they had employees who studied English in college, I can guarantee they don't come across the n-word much, and can we really expect non-native speakers to know all English slang? Especially when most Chinese perfect their English by watching "Friends". When was the last time you heard the n-word on national TV?
The lady who discovered the tag wants to pursue legal action. I think while the whole thing is more than a little unfortunate, it's a little ridiculous to sue. She's going to end up making everything worse.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment