[jzwinck]

We had a system to censor users' IMs. Customers could configure a forbidden word list, or use a default one that had some seemingly obvious swear words. That was fine, until you realize that a global customer base has at least one person with almost any imaginable word in their names.

The North Koreans even made a phallic missile called No-dong. There is just no way to apply English assumptions about what words are across names. Oh, and the South Koreans have a town called Nodong-dong (http://www.agoda.com/city/nodong-dong-kr.html).

[runarb]

Internasional names are hard: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person

In Norway we have a man named "Jo Å" that lives in a city named Å. I often uses that combinations for testing it-systems and gets a lot of odd results.

[Angostura]

Know as the Scunthorpe problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[runarb]

Cool link. There are some real gems there. Especially translating dirty words to "clean" ones seams especially dangerous.

Apparently if the sprinter Tyson Gay had been assassinated in 2008 the American Family Association filtered would have translated it to "Tyson Homosexual has been buttbuttinated" (replacing gay->homosexual and ass->butt).

[CurtMonash]

A story from my wife's first marriage, specifically from when she went back with her Harvard PhD husband to his homeland of Turkey:

Harvard diplomas are of course signed by the university president, who for many years was Derek Curtis Bok. "Bok", in Turkish, means "shit". Turkish bureaucracy evidently requires (or used to require) showing your diploma more often than one might think.

Hilarity ensued.

[huskyr]

The dong is also the currency unit of Vietnam, a minority group in China and lots other things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong

[kalleboo]

In Swedish, the word for the number 6 is the same as the word for sex.

[matt__rose]

A friend had a ball cap from pittsburgh university that said "Pitt" This was very funny to my swedish friends

[bunderbunder]

The same is true of a word for the number 6 in English.

[lignuist]

Porn is a common name in Thailand.