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Comment by agumonkey

4 years ago

Forgot which country (iran, turkey..) but one diacritic on a phone text got a girl killed because it altered the meaning one word. Turning the sentence from loving to threatening or insulting.

19 comments

agumonkey

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asveikau  4 years ago

That sounds terrible, however, it's important to remember that diacritics don't get people killed, the person who decides to kill ultimately needs to stop themselves.

  • _jal  4 years ago

    No, "diacritics don't kill people, people kill people" is not an important life lesson. It is a reductive just-so generalization of basic common sense that obscures more than it enlightens.

    The important thing for engineers to note is a technical shortcoming caused a tragic misunderstanding. Focusing instead on the well-known fact that some people have poor impulse control, knowing full well that is a non-controllable input, instead makes an excuse for poor engineering and implicitly expresses powerlessness to do anything about the problem.

    • asveikau  4 years ago

      I am all for good localization efforts. I've been something of a champion for that whenever I've been around user facing code and people working on it. I also am a bit of a language nerd and not monolingual.

      But yes, misunderstanding or not, we should not kill people.

      The story in the sibling comment is about a man attacking his daughter's ex because the ex came to apologize about a confusion over the Turkish dotless I. That's still a violent attack that the father could have kept his emotions in check. I don't condone calling the daughter names, even accidentally, but it is not a crime and the right response is not attempted murder.

      2 replies →

  • pixl97  4 years ago

    Ya, I don't see that happening in authoritarian countries.

    As a contrived example if you had a symbol for 'happy' you want to be very cautious that it doesn't get converted to 'gay' because in your language gay and happy mean the same thing, in some repressive regime it means the leadership gets to execute you with the approval of the law.

    • zarzavat  4 years ago

      A recent example is that "Let's go [gun emoji] him" could be interpreted as either harmless fun, or conspiracy to murder, depending on if the recipient's phone displays that as a water pistol or a real gun.

      Edit: weirdly HN refuses to display that emoji.

      3 replies →

  • agumonkey  4 years ago

    Even to a lesser extent, it's easy to forget how a small mistake can have a butterfly effect in other cultures.

not2b  4 years ago

In Spanish, dropping one diacritic (~) changes "How old are you?" to "How many anuses do you have?".