A good reason to localize: two killed over sms error

Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail
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Maybe rednano should try scare tactics.

Localisation could have saved the lives of two people in Turkey (via Gizmodo):

The surreal mistake happened because the ex-husband’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

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2 responses to “A good reason to localize: two killed over sms error”

  1. commentator Avatar
    commentator

    That’s mighty strange…the misunderstanding didn’t really happen because of the opened or closed letter ‘i’. If you notice, the eventual word read ‘sikisince’ instead of ‘s?k?s?nca’.

    So whatever happened to the dot over the letter ‘i’ couldn’t have had any effect on the meaning…it’s the final letter in the word that was decisive.

    Which upon analysis, it’s even more perculiar that something like this is happening in Turkey, a country where the national script uses lots of dots and cedillas. Wouldn’t people be getting confusing messages everyday unless their phones support the script? Hmm…

  2. commentator Avatar
    commentator

    That’s mighty strange…the misunderstanding didn’t really happen because of the opened or closed letter ‘i’. If you notice, the eventual word read ‘sikisince’ instead of ‘sıkısınca’.

    So whatever happened to the dot over the letter ‘i’ couldn’t have had any effect on the meaning…it’s the final letter in the word that was decisive.

    Which upon analysis, it’s even more perculiar that something like this is happening in Turkey, a country where the national script uses lots of dots and cedillas. Wouldn’t people be getting confusing messages everyday unless their phones support the script? Hmm…

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