Ali, what’s up | Hacker News Reader

Ali, what’s up

huntingbears.nl

152 pointsroywashere144 comments

Back in 2016, my name ended up on the physical menu in a restaurant in Shenzhen as the english translation for the dish 美式杂扒饭 - "American-style assorted grilled meats." https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/728498064877490176

Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip.

It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS.

https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320

Crazy world.

Lesson: if you can't read the language, blindly trusting translation is always a bit of a gamble!

Funny, Google Translate renders “扒饭” as “grilled rice”. Never trust an automated translation if you don't know both languages.

My knowledge of Chinese is slim (and getting worse!) but 饭 is indeed "rice". However, it is also used as "meal" in a lot of contexts.

It's common to say 吃饭 (eat rice) as a way of saying "to have a meal".

Unsure what it is supposed to mean in this context though.

(note: also don't trust a random person on the internet - me - with your translations)

Fun fact: just as the Chinese (and I think other asian cultures) utilize "rice"(their staple grain) as a synoym for a meal so in English we use the concept of a staple grain as a synoym for a meal: meal.

I can’t believe this usage of “meal” never occurred to me. That’s an amazing bit of trivia.

As far as I can tell, "meal" (time) and "meal" (flour) have different etymological origins. There was still a difference in spelling in Middle English (mel vs mele), but that distinction was lost in Modern English.[0]

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal

This is something of all ages I guess. In the Bible (written thousands of years ago) they use 'eating bread' as a synonym for having a meal together.

"Companion" is literally someone you eat bread with: "co" or "com" is together ("community") and "pan" is bread.

I will add Spanish ”compartir”, to share.

English use tea for some reason.

That's because in Victorian times the lower classes often couldn't afford a meal at that time and had to subside on some tea and perhaps a slice of bread.

The use of "tea" for that meal remains a class signifier; my paternal grandmother used it, my parents did not (my mother, despite not being a native speaker, presumably is the one who eradicated it from my father's vocabulary), and yet I continue to say unwittingly say it occasionally though I now live in the USA. A vestigial Australianism in my case

It's definitely "non-U" in the UK, though that whole world is mostly gone.

I've heard it as "breaking bread." I like the phrase. But yeah, it's essentially the same as eating bread, and it clearly refers to having a meal and is not limited to bread.

I'm also a random person on the Internet, but I can confirm that "饭" can mean both "rice (米)" or meal, depends on the combination of word. "吃饭" almost always mean "have/having/had a meal".

However, based on my research (1), "扒饭" is likely a meal type rather than an action. For example, "鸡扒饭" consists of a bowl of rice covered by a layer of pre-cooked chicken breast plus some veggies. The rice itself seemed normally cooked, not grilled. And yes, this sounded very similar to "盖浇饭" which is also a meal type.

1: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E6%89%92%E9%A5%AD&iax=images&ia=i... yes, quite literally a re-search

(Me been a local to the country, you would assume that I knew this kind of things. Well...no, this is the first time I learned this term. But if someone asks me "Hey do you want some 鸡扒饭?", I'll take my chances.)

I'm a native Chinese. I think it's 猪扒饭 or 鸡扒饭, 猪扒=猪排=pork chops*.

Note: 排 literally means ribs. But this dish has been evolved quite a bit and now 猪排 could be any part of pork, and I'd say pork chop is actually more common than actual ribs nowadays. Same goes to chicken - 鸡排/鸡扒 is typically just chicken breast (not like chicken has ribs to begin with, hehe).

no 吃饭 doesn’t always mean have a meal, when asking if some one would prefer rice or noodle, it’s ‘吃饭还是吃面‘ ( you eat rice or noodle), it heavily depends on the context.

Person from GB: "how about a little tea?"

> It's common to say 吃饭 (eat rice) as a way of saying "to have a meal".

So like “break bread”, “earning bread”, “bread and butter” etc.

Naver, a major Korean website, has its own MT service called Papago [1] which rivals Google translate for supported language pairs. One day it started to translate a URL to Amazon German to an email address of my friend, who is a member of the KDE localization team and presumably his address made into the bilingual corpus Papago used. It took him years and also a governmental intervention to realize the origin of mysterious emails and sort the whole thing out.

[1] https://papago.naver.com/

Hey, the first time I visited Vietnam I was blind tired from traveling, sat down at an outdoor restaurant on a kindergarten sized chair, got a warm beer and looked at a menu where everything was in Vietnamese. The only thing in English was "AMERICAN BEEFSTEAK". So I ordered that (dumb, sure, but they were really amused to have an actual American there. It was a really fun scene, late night and lit up, busy joint).

I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky).

So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol

Believe it or not ... no, you did not eat dog meat.

How do you know ?

I'm curious how you know this, too.

My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item.

It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.

I will explain the reasonings, but I hope that you don't have to read on and just believe my intuition that you really ate beef. This is better for your peace of mind I think :-)

- Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho")

- You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat.

- You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece".

- If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners.

- "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.)

Keep in mind that:

- This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply.

Some links to see:

- Some exotic cuts of beef in Vietnam: https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-... ( archive.today link: http://archive.today/Hr9DY )

- Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)

Reminds me of the "Translate server error" fails: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907

Reminds me of a Chinese menu item that was translated into Korean as "서부 아프리카 원주민의 쓰라린 추위" (bitter coldness of indigenous Western Africans). Made rounds in the Korean internet some years ago.

Tangent, but in similar vein, has anyone seen in the past year or two on Dell.com their cookie notification? The “I agree” button has consistently said “Everyone’s the Acceptor” for me.

At first I thought there was something weird going on client-side, but it happens to me on every OS. Just took this screenshot on my iPhone:

https://i.ibb.co/r4M5Cb9/52238-CC7-81-BD-4-B3-D-934-F-77-DB9...

(from URL: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sf/xps-laptops )

I get the same “Accept everyone”.

Sounds like what bad translator might make of "accept all" [cookies/terms]

“Embrace all” That’s the spirit

I saw this the other day. I love to see little tidbits of dev insanity bleed through into final products, though I hope it wasn't crunch-induced insanity.

A bank dev team I may or may not have worked in, accidentally deployed «allrighty, chap» on the confirmation button for fund purchases. Might have caused some consternation.

I figure we should just have left it like that.

What’s more worrying is that it’s been there for a very long time. Either nobody at Dell noticed, nobody cares, or nobody is able to fix it.

More likely, no one is willing to do the change paperwork just for that.

That falls under “nobody cares” I think.

Once you make it hard to care, or even punish people with additional work if they care, they stop caring.

Maybe everyone is using an ad blocker, which (at least in my case) prevents the cookie popup.

Or maybe everyone really is the acceptor!

I noticed the same thing in Dutch, French and German.

This is weird, I have the "correct" message in both French (fr-fr) and English (en-us).

Mine now says "Accept everyone" which is a bit more wholesome.

We once did an order cancelling feature in crunch. The prompt had a cancel button in green (which will actually cancel order) and a cancel button in white.

Clearly the correct choices are "Cancel" and "Cancel cancel"

Their site must be doing location detection, because it served me a cookie warning in half-English, half-Japanesee. The blue box is "Agree to everything and continue", which is grammatical (if verbose).

The rest of the message, though ... it starts off "Our website is Cookie (クッキー)" and looks like two translations got jammed together.

https://i.imgur.com/1u5mwLT.png

This can be very simple:

1. A bored male person opens the site and types the first thing that comes to his mind in the search box.

2. Website records this as a new search and suggests it at random to new visitors.

3. Curious people click it, interested to see what the site will respond.

4. Website notices it is a popular suggestion! Suggests it to more people.

5. GOTO 3.

I have seen similar bizarre (though not offensive) suggestions in google search. My colleage typed: “how do I” and google suggested “how do i make my girlfriend hold her hand in front of a screen and pretend she’s a dinosaur”. (Or something like it). Someone typed it once, and if it is a random suggestion it gets clicked by about everybody.

For several years, searching "client/server database" on Google would return a first result for a web page with a pretty explicit description of a sex act, and then a million results referencing this page. At some point they fixed it, and evidence that this ever happened is hard to find. It survives in an urban dictionary entry[0]. I suspect the cause was pretty similar to what you describe.

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=client%2Fser...

I blame it on machine translation.

DeepL, for example, fails hilariously with certain inputs. I once got it to mistranslate things like these:

- "孔明" (Kongming, the genius strategist/statesman from China's Three Kingdoms period) got translated as "Confucius"

- "chage and aska" (a Japanese pop music duo) got translated as "曹操" (Cao Cao, founder of the Wei state during China's Three Kingdoms period) or even "ちんちん" (literally "penis" in Japanese)

> "孔明" (Kongming, the genius strategist/statesman from China's Three Kingdoms period) got translated as "Confucius"

AI finally reached the level of a lazy high school history student who didn't study enough.

Google Translate once translated 万 (ten thousand in Chinese) to “million” for me. I was shocked it could make such a basic mistake. It wasn’t even that long ago, maybe 2018? Machine translation has a loooong way to go.

Not so bad for a machine, I once met a French Telco guy in charge of buying/selling minutes at a large operator who thought that "billion" meant "two million"

i remember reading something similar (unit conversion) on HN. Maybe someone can link.

Maybe because France use the long scale, so a billion is a million millions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#French-sp...

Same in Norway. I'm from the US and the large numbers always take some thought. I didn't realize that I'd have to relearn counting when moving here, but honestly it is easier than trying to relate the time of day.

The fact that international confusion over billions doesn't arise more often points out how bad people are at thinking about large numbers. We mostly don't notice the difference between a billion and a trillion.

IIRC even this error seeps into a publication made by the GOP. Something about HVAC system in Wuhan.

It was like that in 2020 as well -- I remember being really confused trying to see how many views a Daoko video on billibilli had.

IIRC at that point it would translate e.g. "23 万" correctly, but 23万 would go to 23 million.

I tried reporting the error, no idea if they actually pay attention to those!

> Machine translation has a loooong way to go.

Since large numbers on e.g. streaming sites are often reported in multiples of 万 in Chinese, but a million in English, I did wonder if the machine "learned" that they were equivalent.

My favourite translation error lately was this one:

https://imgur.com/a/C8zV5Do

I'm already searching in German, so no need to translate; and it 'translated' by replacing 'Englisch' into 'Deutsch'.

Top marks amazon! :D

That reminds me of the automatic translator in Telegram. If for example you translate from German to English and the message includes a German flag emoji, under certain conditions (that aren't very clear to me) it will turn into a British flag.

Afaik Telegram just uses Google Translate for that feature. Could you maybe try copying a message where that happens into Google Translate?

Oh man, Imgur has definitely fallen victim to asshole design. I was confused with the image you had linked for a while until I realized the image was hidden under a banner ad.

The one I was looking at was a completed unrelated “suggested image”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220506081417/https://huntingbe...

thanks!

I have also noticed a very sudden inrush of "adult-themed" products in the endless matrices of suggestions (with thumbnail images!) that are plastered all over the site.

I would very much appreciate a way to turn those product groups off, since they disrupt my searches for weird handtools, components, and other stuff that I actually buy (and quite often, I've been a customer since 2014).

Searching for "weird handtools" might be why you're getting those results.

There’s actually a setting somewhere which is why the OP got a picture of a puppy.

I can’t at all remember where that flag is, and tbh some products are shown anyway, but it’s there.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Someone probably didn't know to translate "sexy party dress" or something like that.

Agreed. For some reason, translation is considered secondary, and many websites resort to automatic translation tools. They produce content that seems "good enough" but often result in snafus like this.

A proper translation company would cost a lot more, sure, but the results would be orders of magnitude better.

This is somewhat similar to the way money is spent on making movies. Pennies are saved during the writing process, and millions wasted on stars, locations, special effects, to shoot pointless scenes in stories that make no sense.

> Pennies are saved during the writing process, and millions wasted on stars, locations, special effects, to shoot pointless scenes in stories that make no sense.

I believe that's not incompetence but risk aversion. They're deathly afraid of trying anything that deviates from the norm because they will lose money if they don't make something that makes all focus groups happy.

The "popular search term" theory also fits with incompetence since it's automation run wild :)

Aliexpress at one point decided I was going to have to learn either Russian or Hebrew if I wanted to shop there again. It seems tied to my account as it just flips me right back to either one of those languages when I log in. It helped me get out of my low-key shopping addiction at least.

A few months ago, one of the sellers I had purchased some stuff from (only for about €200 over a span of 2 years) contacted me on my personal email and asked in very broken English if everything was alright since he hadn't seen me in a while. He sent me a bunch of coupons for his Aliexpress shop and several links to those really well made fakes everyone is always looking for on there (so now you know, the trick to finding those is through your Shanghai bff :) ).

The products are cheap, the sellers surprisingly kind, but the place itself is just really weird!

One day when you are lost and i jured in a forest, who will find you? An aliexprress seller!

I gave it a try but only got suggestions to search for "hoesje voor samsung galaxy a12" (phone case for Samsung A12), "hulpmiddelen voor bandenreparatie" (tyre repair things) and "horloges mannen horloge luxe merk" (luxury brad male watches) and similar things. I never shopped at Aliexpress so I do not have a search history there, I also wipe cookies and browser-stored data between visits to commercial properties and I refuse all third-party content (31% of the Aliexpress front page is blocked but it still seems to work). Could these lewd suggestions be related to whatever it happens to infer from the visitor's history? It is worth an experiment...

I just set up an unprotected browser (Chrome) in a container and cycled through the nl.aliexpress.com front page about 30 times. It gave me a number of suggestions like the ones mentioned above, none of them of sexual nature. I then closed nl.aliexpress.com and opened pornhub.com and xhamster.com, closed those sites again and opened nl.aliexpress.com again in a new tab. It gave me a suggestion of 'neukende vrouwen' (fucking women) after reloading the site three times. This could be a coincidence, of course.

I don't know, I opened nl.aliexpress.com in a private browser tab and immediately got the NSFW suggestion on first try.

The class of the div where the suggestions are placed is class="hot-words", so I would say this is the result of someone spamming the search box with nasty terms and AliExpress just showing them based on 'popularity'.

It's just a slightly weird translation of a popular search query, which Aliexpress uses as search text placeholder. But that's actual items that Aliexpress sells and they do exactly what the text says, so there is nothing really wrong here on a technical level.

Now if those items or their search queries should make it into front-page recommendation, that's another story.

Aliexpress does not sell women afaik

They are probably looking to expand into the market vacuum left by Silk Road, lol

Next week they will do 'medications'?

What exactly is "women having sex" a weird translation for? I can get how "panties for sex" is an awkward translation for lingerie, but the Dutch one seems off.

If I go to nl.aliexpress.com I get "neukende vrouwen naakt bikini" which translates to "fucking women nude bikini" which is the game-of-telephone version of "panties for sex". OP got a shorter version with the "naakt bikini" missing.

I'm confident the localizations are done on the fly, automatically; it makes sense, as it did ten+ years ago, to pull a site's content through google translate or an equivalent so that you cover more languages. But it has flaws, obviously.

I can imagine translation engines don't do very well with just one off words and phrases like "accept all" as mentioned in the comment about Dell's website, instead of them being used in a sentence.

It's translation engines and the cheapest translation services, who will also try to use automation as much as possible.

Yep, and they probably have a "bad word" filter for english, chinese and maybe spanish, while they let all the other languages go through.

They probably went like my previous client through a cycle of starting with a single text file of bad words --> to integrating with one proper swearing service (pottymouth, cleanspeak, etc. --> to several services in fallback mode in several languages --> to realising with their traffic that costs a bomb so to back to static files again. Hopefully i18n bundles but probably as you say just in a couple languages.

I have always been able to swear everywhere online in Norwegian.

They assuredly do not have one for English -- "sex panties" and "dildo" are just as common for English placeholders.

Neither of those sound like "bad words"? Notable absence of "fuck panties".

This reminds me of another translation Aliexpress (used to?) make for the Dutch version. In English, "China" can mean 2 things:

- The country

- The ceramic material

In Dutch these have 2 different words("China" and "Porselein"). Aliexpress translated "China" in the "Shipping from" section to "Porselein"(so the ceramic material).

Few things scares me away as fast from a shop as an obviously machine translated web page.

I have no issue buying from a English webpage, but a webpage machine translated to danish makes me doubt the competence of the page and if its even possible for me to communicate with customer support if needed.

My favorite of Ali Express in Dutch is that they ship from Porcelain. We understand they mean China and it's obvious what happened.

Their MT for Chinese to Dutch was trained on Chinese translations but used for Dutch translations.

Try looking for Raspberry Pi related stuff on Ali. It's funny how many times the auto-translated text talks about "frambozentaart" (Dutch for raspberry pie). Gotta love it.

I've had the suggestion "sex balls" show up as the place holder of the search box once. I posted a screenshot of it back in 2019: https://twitter.com/DavieDavieDave/status/117813945962534502...

The website seems to have fallen due to the HN hug of death, but I've seen this making rounds in the Polish news - there have been screenshots of slang mentions of female genitals in the Polish version of Aliexpress.

I got it before it went down and downloaded it, but don't really know how to distribute a mirror via the files I have locally.

Am I crazy or is the actual NSFW term never actually described by the blog post?

I can't for the life of me figure out what, exactly, is the issue here because I do not speak Dutch or German.

In the image it's the grey text in the red bar next to AliExpress. I know Dutch as a second language and it pops out as very rude, like something you would see on a porn site. The Google Translation is accurate.

The term is "Höschen fur ficken"

> Höschen means panties, and ficken means, well…

Hint: Dutch is a close cousin to English. Try just pronouncing it.

I appreciate your response, but this is the same thing I'm annoyed about by the article itself -- it's an article written in English, describing a naughty phrase in Dutch, and then leaves only hints about the real problem. We're all adults here, you can write the phrase without fear of reprimand.

I think it's a little... I don't know, rude? Inconsiderate? to leave the reader with the task of filling in the blanks.

"neukende vrouwen" means "women fucking" in Dutch.

"Höschen für ficken" means panties for fucking in German.

As you see, a hint is enough :P

It means „Panties for fucking“.

Dutch person here. Not sure if I can actually post the translation here due to rules/moderation, but the dutch term basically means "women in the process of copulating". Likewise, the german one means "panties for copulating". I'm guessing that copulating is a term that I'm allowed to use here, but the real translation is the actual word that you'd normally use.

As for the rude/inconsiderate part: I guess it is a little bit rude, as the target audience is clearly english speakers.

On a similar note (unrelated to this discussion), as a dutch dev who works a lot with americans I think it's quite rude when native english speakers use idioms ("bob's your uncle", etc) when speaking with non-native english speakers. Even though they understand the words they still have to infer the meaning of such idioms from context, which can make them feel stupid (especially if they get it wrong).

The worst one being the "what's up?" or "how are you doing?" greeting without expecting an actual, heart-felt response. That one always gets me.

The linked article includes 'The text means "women who are f*cking"'. Seems fairly clear unless they added this after your post.

The article seems to have been updated to include the English translation. It wasn’t there when I posted originally.

If the author is reading this, thank you for the update, it’s much appreciated

"Höschen fur ficken"

Is German not Dutch.

The Dutch text "neukende vrouwen" means "women who are having sex". The German text "Höschen fur ficken" means "panties for having sex".

I agree that for an article obviously intended for an international audience it's weird and lazy not to provide a translation for the very thing that the article is about.

The Dutch one is explained in the post as “women who are fcking”, but the German one is not spelled out quite so clearly. It’s “panties for fcking”. Does that help?

My Spanish isn't perfect, but the suggestion text "hombres denudos xxx" seems like it might not be to everyone's liking. Too bad they don't have a Swedish site, I'm curious what they'd come up with for us!

China (and many other countries') firewalls block porn sites, so I've wondered if many people are misusing AliExpress for... something else.

Coming soon... AliHub? AliXXXpress?

What's the relevance? Why would Chinese people, of all people, would misunderstand Aliexpress, a Chinese company's e-commerce website, as a porn site?

If anything, Chinese typically don't really use Aliexpress at all, but Taobao or TMall.

Exhibitionists certainly like to use it, since AlixExpress allows uploading images in the reviews... some interesting things to be seen when browsing lingerie reviews, or so I've been told cough

Could it be that the placeholder is based on the most popular search and the most popular search wherever Aliexpress is not mainstream is a NSFW term?

It seems to. The placeholder and popular search are different for differnet languages. You can switch to Deutsch and try to translate the page.

likely. they do have extensive underwear and sex toy collections and their prices are very low compared to shops in europe that sell the same stuff way overpriced

I don't know, I got "Höschen für ficken" too a while ago and WTFed. It sounds like a bad machine translation tbh, not like something anyone would say/type. So if anything it had to be searched a lot in other languages and then be translated automatically, but that's... a weird approach? Why not track the most searched terms for each localized version individually?

Generally I don't know what most people buy on AliExpress though. For me it's for electronics parts/sensors/... where I can't find a cheap offering on Amazon, or if I feel adventurous and want to try out some weird electronics device that you can't get here at all. But do people buy panties on AliExpress? Doesn't sound like you'd save much, you can get them pretty cheap on Amazon etc. But maybe the ones on Amazon are unsuitable for fscking?

Loaded up the website, German locale, I got this suggestion too.

I guess to test the theory about "most popular search", one would have to get a botnet to search for a random string, to see if it would show up as a suggestion.

As a side effect, the bot that monitors the suggestions and create spam offers might start offering "e99a507d-c1ef-416c-b704-166561a44ccd" for sale...

Popular Porcelainese search terms or catalogue sections, presumably not obscene, automatically translated to European? Actual popular Dutch search terms from Dutch-locale users wouldn't be obscene (presumably).

I get "human hair wigs" in the UK

Probably a combination of this and them not having a "bad word" filter for those languages (while having one for eg. english)

I don't think Aliexpress sells fornicating women. I have no clue why anyone would type in that - if anyone is looking for adult-oriented entertainment, add "dvd" or "film" (both have exact same spelling + meaning in dutch).

Aliexpress is (as far as i know) a place where you buy things. This suggestion is not abuyable thing.

On the contrary, if you are interested in this kind of entertainment, it is not unreasonable to look for “women fucking” and expect results related to that and not actual human beings. Not that I would do that. Ahem…

Anyway, I regularly just enter keywords without appending “book” when I am looking for some books on Amazon. For example, I would not expect “WWII aircraft carriers” to return a listing for the actual thing.

GoDaddy's automatic translation to Turkish might be worse. Last time I checked, DNS Manager's "points to (IP address)" column translated to "fiyat/performans" which means "price/performance" in Turkish. Notificed GoDaddy about it years ago but they've never changed and I think it's still that way.

They also use the very same word for creating accounts versus logging in to existing account. They clearly did not verify the translation. I have yet to receive 3 packages from China ordered end on Jan 2022 (I don't want them anymore after all this time), but its a nightmare to get my money back.

If these are just popular terms typed into the Aliexpress search bar in Dutch rather than some machine translation bug I'm not surprised.

I've worked on several high end furniture shopping sites which got a small but consistent visits from people searching for pornography.

> I've worked on several high end furniture shopping sites which got a small but consistent visits from people searching for pornography.

I'm... puzzled, but also speechless. What were they expecting on a furniture site? Any chance these were bots? (Though I wouldn't discount human stupidity)

A bunch of people are a bit confused by large white search bars at the top of the screen, often mistaking them for the address bar.

Hypothesis: this phenomena has been exacerbated by browsers, which have trained people that URLs and search are the same thing by having them search using the address bar. Also explains people searching for website names on Google.

I can confirm that this happens in Italian as well. I've never visited the site before and my search placeholders in the top bar are just full of weird NSFW terms.

Weirdly, it only happens to the desktop site, if I access it via mobile I get mostly normal suggestions.

I have tried to contact them several times for at least 7 years because they have a bug on the orders confirmation page for my local language. It displays HTML code instead of the translated text.

One time someone even answered that they are aware of it.

My guess is that the suggested search is a common or trending search term. Then in most languages they apply a naughty-word list filter, but in other languages perhaps their filter is non-existent or in-exhaustive.

For the record, the ones that I noticed a few weeks ago on the English site were "human hair wigs" and "dildo". Could be that they don't blacklist at all, or that they have a fun test data set that was accidentally pushed to prod.

Ali does have some kinky stuff though and their terminology/suggestions can get really strange even in English. For example, I tinker with old road bikes. A very handy gadget for changing to modern shifters is a "downtube cable stop" but you'll never find it on Ali under that name. I need to go to my old orders and find it again. Ah yes, "outer stopper assembly" brings it right up. Fairly pricey by Ali standards; I expect these are genuine Shimano parts just not worth producing cheap en masse.

The whole idea of "NSFW" is hypocrisy. It has to die for good. Every time something "NSFW" breaks out - that's awesome.

There are things/words we all have seen/heard but somehow are meant to pretend we have not. This is absurd. This is why many problems exist and can't be fixed - because we are taught the way of thinking/speaking when we pretend living in a version of reality different from what actually is real, even when we are perfectly aware of that.

I don't think NSFW means that we need to pretend that we haven't heard of it before. It just means that at work, where we are all paid to be there, it probably isn't a great topic.

I really don't want to be walking around an office and seeing someone being murdered on a coworkers monitor or have a coworker talk about the sex they had on the weekend.

> It just means that at work, where we are all paid to be there, it probably isn't a great topic.

Sure, as long as what we compare to is the actual business we are meant to do.

> really don't want to be walking around an office and seeing someone being murdered on a coworkers monitor or have a coworker talk about the sex they had on the weekend.

Why? If our work process allows to take a break and read news (instead of just working non-stop) - it's OK to view a crime scene on the monitor. If we consider it fine to talk about the barbecue they had on the weekend it also is OK to talk about the sex they had on the weekend. IMHO. Why not?

Using google translate on Taobao is also a load of fun. You are buying babies. Customer representatives call you darling... And there are many more.

> Customer representatives call you darling

This is actually true. They call you "亲", which could be translated to darling.

This is a weird thing though. Chinese people almost never call each other "亲", not even between husband and wife. But one day suddenly it became a common phrase used in customer service.

Using dictation function of my Apple Macbook. In Dutch. I say: 'abstract data types'. MacOS - not understanding English in Dutch mode - translates into : 'heb seksdate thuis' ('having a sex date at home').

This happened while dictating feedback to students..

Mine defaults to German and states "Vibrators" (in German).

Years and years of 4chan have fried my brains to the point that it makes perfect sense what this all means, but I think it’s just meme-psychosis inspired magical thinking.

Ive seen this exactly in the Spanish language (es-PE) version too. You also get suggestions that literally include XXX and other key terms

Haha, I noticed that as well some weeks ago!

I thought some user-specific ad-specific search-specific shenanigans were going on for my account... :D

Definitely something strange going on haha… at the moment, en-us, I see “frontal wig human hair”

This isn’t really NSFW in DE… many shopping sites will show erotic items of the main page.

Yeah I noticed the same last night. The search suggestions are also wildly... suggestive

confirmed in spanish

The page is slashdotted.

Edit: ah yes, you are talking about the blog..

I think he meant the blog post hosted by Michiel, not AliExpress the massive conglomerate…

I think parent comment is about the blog, not Aliexpress.

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