Neither pants nor couch turned out to be racist, but Chinese translation program sucks

It?s not often that the world of fashion retail has any real scandal or controversy, but there?s a picture raging through Twitter and other social media of a pair of knock-off Abercrombie & Fitch pants that are described as ?nigger brown.? The source of this egregious error appears to be a Chinese translation program called Kingsoft that made this exact same error in 2007, when a Toronto couple bought a brown couch with the same racial slur in the colour description.

The racist product description appeared on the site abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com?both the pants and the site seem to have since been taken down?a knock-off of the popular American clothing retailer. The company operating this site may not have intended the error, but it behaved carelessly and the outcome was damaging. As for Kingsoft, it's been aware of the problem in its program for five years, and it seems to not have bothered getting around to fixing it:

A Chinese software company, Kingsoft Corp., acknowledged its translation program was at fault. When the Chinese characters for "dark brown" are typed into an older version of its Chinese-English translation software, the offensive description comes up. (The program's 2007 version does not produce that result.) The software had been programmed with terms garnered from a Chinese-English dictionary.

Photo courtesy of qmnonic, via Flickr.

Source: http://toronto.openfile.ca/blog/curator-blog/curated-news/2012/neither-pants-nor-couch-turned-out-be-racist-chinese-translati-0

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