Lorem Ipsue: when internationalization goes bad

I recently saw a Master cable lock for sale with the interesting text "Lore Ipsum!" and "Lorem Ipsue!" underneath the word "Pull". If you've done any graphic design or web mockups, you're probably familiar with the Lorem ipsum text that's traditionally used as a placeholder. This Latin-based text is used, for instance, when you want to show the style and layout of a website, but don't want people to get distracted by the words.
Lock with text 'Lore ipsum' and 'Lorem ipsue'
Apparently when they designed the lock packaging, they put in placeholders but forgot to replace them with the French and Spanish translations ("Tirez!" and "¡Tira!"). I find "Lorem Ipsue!" in place of "Lorem Ipsum" interesting; maybe it is supposed to be a more Spanish-sounding placeholder, but I would have been more impressed by ¡Lorem Ipsum!

The moral is: make sure you check your internationalization; just because it looks foreign doesn't mean it's right.

4 comments:

JDawson said...

Thats is very funny.
I too am a web designer, and your mom subs at my school.
She told me about you and i am planning on reading some of your books about fractals

krekr said...

Thanks! I was given a Harman receiver without the remote and was able to learn a cheap programmable remote the important buttons (volume, power) through an Arduino! Best regards, Gregor van Egdom (www.krekr.nl)

Anonymous said...

Once I found a nativity set at Walmart that said "Insert Spanish Translation here" on every spot on the box where Spanish was expected.

(Yes, I know this post was made years ago, but I found your blog earlier today had have spent the last 4+ hours reading it).

Ken Shirriff said...

Anonymous: that's funny, "Insert Spanish Translation here" left on the package. (And I'm glad that someone is reading my old posts...)