Apple just completed its first new product announcement without iconic founder Steve Jobs, who passed away on Wednesday. The unveiling of the iPhone 4S disappointed many of the techies waiting with bated breath on the iPhone 5, but the demonstration of a virtual assistant app called “Siri” was one of the highlights. Siri is capable of understanding and acting on natural human speech commands to an uncanny degree. It’s like having a (hopefully better-tempered) HAL in your pocket.
Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask Siri to translate her name into some other languages before the big reveal. If they had, Apple might have realized that it had a potential translation fail on its hands.
First of all, to many Japanese listeners, “Siri” sounded an awful lot like “Shiri,” which means “buttocks.” In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google Japan was at least at one point suggesting “尻,” the kanji character for “shiri,” whenever users searched for “Siri.” Nice!
But that’s not all. Oh no. One astute Georgian Gizmodo reader wrote in to advise that in Georgian, “siri” is a rather vulgar way of referring to one’s penis, causing one of their writers to comment:
“[T]he Georgian phallic term is actually spelled letter for letter like Apple’s voice magic. I’m sure a lot of us, no matter what nation we hail form, turn to our genitals for advice. But I can’t remember the last time mine set up a geospatial text reminder for me.”
It’s understandable that Apple wouldn’t catch the coincidental resemblance to Georgian slang. However, they really should have checked the name for possible negative connotations in Japanese. While Siri is not available to Japan just yet, they had to have realized that Japanese techies would be watching. As MSNBC notes, the iPhone commands 72 percent of the market for smartphones there.
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This is so typical of the Americanization of the world’s languages.
Either there is not enough time for researchers to do their job correctly or there is a mischievious dark side of letting the words fall where they may.
Too many 4 letter words out there already that spark the imagination.
“Siri” or “Shiri” would likely be written in katakana, which generally denotes a word as “foreign” in the Japanese language. So it could be written “シリ” and Japanese people would most likely intuitively understand that it is not meant to be related to お尻. Although I’m sure it would still be the butt (pardon the pun) of some jokes.
If they wanted to distance themselves from the negative connotation, they could use the unconventional, but still grammatically correct “スィリ” (suii-ree) to get a similar sound.
Japanese has many words that are that close to being other words; it really can’t be helped. As for Georgian slang, there are so many “slang” words for penis in English that it really isn’t surprising that you can find one in another language, Dick.
Now that’s just Sirry.
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