Hana kuma means “flower bear” in Japanese.... has a far more explicit meaning in Swahili, where it translates to “woman without a vagina.”
Posted on 06/27/2022 2:20:49 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Hana kuma means “flower bear” in Japanese.... has a far more explicit meaning in Swahili, where it translates to “woman without a vagina.”
I guess they’ll just have to risk offending all the swahili speaking tennis stars.
That is precisely what ESSO (Eastern States Standard Oil) did when they chose "EXXON" as their new name. It's not a word in any known language, much less a naughty word.
More than 125 million people speak Japanese but only about 16 million people speak Swahili.
And when did they do that, and how did they conduct their search? I doubt very much that they actually surveyed ALL world languages.
According to Wiki, it is estimated that there could be up to 3000 different languages in Africa, with 500 in Nigeria alone - and that isn’t counting all the other continents. I guarantee that ‘Esso’ is likely to mean something in some other language that is vulgar, or just ridiculous.
It seems that as the world becomes smaller and more connected, there are going to be endless cultural pitfalls. What a ridiculous world to live in, until people start acting from good sense instead of their little ‘feelings’.
But I'm sure you're right that they didn't check EVERY language, probably just the most prevalent few hundred.
Convert any statement into the thousands of world languages and you are bound to come up with something vulgar. Btw - I don’t like these people so I hope they fail at everything.
Probably where they expected to do significant business.
I don’t know much about them at all - but nutty criticisms of them like this ‘flower bear’ business just weaken any legitimate criticism of their truly serious errors.
LOL. Babel, part 2,
Actually, “she” was always a boy playing a girl. She simply can’t pass anymore so “she” is transitioning to her real sex.
There are research businesses that do exactly that for their customers to avoid this situation.
Probably not every language, but all of those with a large population of speakers. This situation is the nightmare of international companies.
She was born XY? I’ll have to look that up.
It’s not in her bio. Hollywood is full of secret trans. It’s all about deception. They are not the loud and proud trans. They pass as real until they can’t. Far more than any would think.
As the world gets smaller and businesses expand geographically, they will need to hire linguists - and/or sophisticated programs - to figure things like this out.
But even then, there will be a point where common sense needs to rule. As in so many other situations now, companies can’t possibly cater to every touchy little population and specific cultural concern, without essentially paralyzing themselves.
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