Monday, July 17, 2006

An embarrassing mistake

Not an article about clothing worn by Courtney, but an article about a mistake someone made using Wikipedia.

Basically, someone's just released an 'Open film'. An Open film is intended to be similar to an open source programme - every possible element of the film has been publicly released so that people can mix it up (mash ups and the like). The film has been released under the creative commons licence.

The creative commons licence allows people to edit, retouch and mess about with a film as long as they release it under the same terms. It's a slowly growing movement on the internet to try and democratise content against a growing onslaught of IP lawyers.

Anyways, the person in charge of releasing the DVDs had managed to get the film script translated into a whole host of different languages. He thought it arrogant to give subtitle options only in English rather than native (German vs Deutsch).

He went through Wikipedia to try and update the subtitle menu with the correct words. Unfortunately, the day he did it for Catalan, someone had vandalised the page and replaced it with something else. So, instead of it saying Catalan, it said 'Polaco' which is the Catalan equivalent of Taffy for the Welsh.

How humourous. Not as bad as Microsoft who managed to translate one of their brazilian offerings so that it gave you a choice of being a male or a bitch. Nice.

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