Doris Moore was shocked when her new couch was delivered to her home with a label that used a racial slur to describe the dark brown shade of the upholstery. The situation was even more alarming for Moore because it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out "n——- brown" on the tag. "My daughter saw the label and she knew the color brown, but didn't know what the other word meant. She asked, 'Mommy, what color is that?' I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I never thought that's how she'd learn of that word," Moore said.
The mother complained to the furniture store, which blamed the supplier, who pointed to a computer problem as the source of the derogatory label. Kingsoft Corp., a Chinese software company, acknowledged its translation program was at fault and said it was a regrettable error. "I know this is a very bad word," Huang Luoyi, a product manager for the Beijing-based company's translation software, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
He explained that when the Chinese characters for "dark brown" are typed into an older version of its Chinese-English translation software, the offensive N-word description comes up. "We got the definition from a Chinese-English dictionary. We've been using the dictionary for 10 years. Maybe the dictionary was updated, but we probably didn't follow suit," he said. |