“How on earth did smartphone maker Nokia not realize that the names of its latest devices — the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 — happen to match a colloquial term for “prostitute” in Spanish?,” Rosa Golijan asks for MSNBC.com.
“The Real Academia Española is an institution that is considered one of the authorities of the Spanish language. According to its online dictionary, “lumia” is a synonym for ‘prostituta,'” Golijan reports. “Yes, that translates as ‘Person who has sex for money.'”
Golijan writes, “Someone should’ve cracked open an etymology book or twenty at some point during the product naming process and researched things.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s actually quite appropriate, coming from a company that’s become Microsoft’s bitch.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Winston” for the heads up and inspiring our Take.]
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Great take! 😀
Open wide, Lumia, here comes the Zune!
Ah, Allen?
Nokia’s Lumia means a male prostitute?
This makes perfect sense…. as with a prostitute, you OVERPAY to get jerked around and end up feeling dirty.
(well, that’s what I’ve heard from a friend of mine…)
Well, Mitsubishi call one of its SUVs ‘Pajero’ (wanker), go figure.
Back in the 70’s Ford named one of its car the Pinto. In Peru pinto means… how do I put this delicately; the appendage next to Ballmers Left Nut.
Lumia, Zune and something about squirting.
Some kind of joke there.
I think MS marketers are Apple fans and the come up with these things purposefully to harm MS.
How appropriate.
Urban dictionary:
Slide to open = A phrase used to describe a girl that is “easy”.
Their version of a personal assistant; you just got f…………..
At least they didn’t pick the name “puta”…which is portuguese for prostitute lolol. That would made quite a buzz here
Same in Spanish…. “Lumia” is not a word we use every day.
It’s still funny, LOL!!
I’m from Spain and everybody knows what it means
it reminds me of the samething happened years ago with the Mitsubishi “Pajero”, they had to change the name lolol.
will Nokia do the same?
“Siri” translates as “buttocks” ( 尻 ) in Japanese.
If I read the article correctly, it sounds the same but Siri is spelt differently.
What is missed in that article is that Siri was the name when Apple purchased it. Apple did not name the personal assistant Siri. So, Apple never made that mistake. They just bought into it.
Yes, the spellings are quite different: “Siri” versus “尻”
NO. It only becomes that because most.. many Japanese are not capable of saying Si…. (sounds like see or sea) and it is spoken as their ”し” (shi). As sucj Siri ends up being shiri. If the country actually tried to speak foreign languages and not twist it into their own, then there would be no problem.
More importantly how did they manage to call them the 800 and 710. Or is that the cost of a …
Quite appropos!!!
The name will fit perfectly with all the frustrated users throwing it to the ground yelling, “fscking whore!!!”
Well if Apple can have a personal assistant, surely Nokia can have their version, even if she is a bit of a slut.
Chevy Nova, anyone?
Worst selling car ever I. Mexico
Nova sounds the same as “no va”
Translates to “no go”
Wrong.
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
I was thinking the same thing. Obviously there will be something lost in translation when you are a global country.
Forget the “pad” jokes when the iPad was launched, I do remember some complaints that iPod and iPad are pronounced very similarly in Britain.
You either change the product name depending on the language market, or you redefine the word: just convince the consumer that lumia used to mean ‘prostitute’, now it means crappy device susceptible to viruses, I overpriced and short of quality apps.
Harkens back to the days of Iacocca and the Chrysler “K” cars. They were going to be called “S” cars, but Iacocca saw one on the proving grounds track and said, “Look at that S-car-go! … Oops.”
It looks like a cross between a first gen iPod Mini and an iPhone…it’s being touted as “the best Windows phone ever”, which is sort of like being the best winless team in the NFL.
MicroSoft is paying money to put their software in the Nokia boxes.
And those boxes are called Lumia?
Too many plays on words possible……
MicroSoft, in this context, may be a word that is predictive of the success of this coupling though……. couldn’t resist……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wilfred
Thomas Wilfred (June 18, 1889 Denmark – June 10, 1968, Nyack, New York) born Richard Edgar Løvstrom, was a musician and inventor. He is best known for his visual music he named lumia and his designs for color organs called Clavilux. Wilfred was not fond of the term “color organ”, and coined the word “Clavilux” from Latin meaning “light played by key”.
Don’t forget that Nokia is Finnish where lumia is plural partitive of ‘lumi’ which means snow in English.
You can verify this on any decent dictionary.
OTOH Nokia is itself cheap by adopting Micro$oft software 🙁
“Pays For Sure”
“me love you long time” lol
Japanese man: Hello, Shiri
iPhone 4s: Don’t call me Shirley
fuck u son of a bitch, ur mom is the microsoft’s bitch…. Nokia rules