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It may not even be accurate to call it "slang"... I am working on a filtering system that blocks pornography. I have a set of key words and phrases in English. Essentially, I would like to have the equivalent of these words and phrases in various languages. I considered trying to use Google Translate but was unsure how accurate it would be on the wide range of slang naughty words and phrases I have. I thought about posting it as a job on Elance but I am unsure if someone on there will be able to do significantly better than I could using the right slang translator.

Thoughts? Ideas? Web site links?

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  • Uhm I'm not sure this is strictly related to us...
    – Alenanno
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 8:57
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    You just want to be able to swear at taxi drivers, don't you!
    – user780
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 9:48
  • @user548971, could you adjust the subject to better reflect what you're asking for?
    – kaleissin
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 17:58
  • Sorry, It's pretty obvious I'm not a linguist, huh? What would you suggest? "How to translate words for blocking porngraphy?"
    – user548971
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 19:55
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    Maybe "What is the best way to accurately translate NSFW-related slang?"
    – Alenanno
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 10:11

1 Answer 1

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I think you might be going at this the wrong way. Naughty words are naughty because they are used in a naughty manner, not because of what they actually mean, or used to mean. If we look at general swearwords, where they're taken from depends very much on culture. Where I am from, the bad, native swearwords are religious in theme: satan, hell, damn you etc. Swearwords realted to bodily functions and sex are much rarer, many borrowed from English actually. In Brussels, some use the word "architect" as a swearword. Considering some of the architecture there and the history of how those buildings came about, that is very understandable. Due to some of the architecture that have turned up where I live, I've started using "architect" as a swearword myself.

What I think you are looking for is euphemisms, inoffensive words being used as stand-ins for offensive words. Euphemisms is a rich source of new naughty words, as the offensive meaning "rubs off", and then the euphemism needs a euphemism of its own. You'd need some way of discovering words that mean soft, words for anything that resembles a stick, and words for temperatures above normal at least, but this is fascinatingly unpredictable really.

The simplest would probably be to find porn-sites in various languages, sort them on language, get the text-content and use that to train a learning spam-filter. (You'll need text from non-porn sites too). Then see if you can pick out words or preferrably several word-pairs or word-triplets from that that are good indicators of "porniness".

And now for the obligatory reference in this case ;)

Quang Phúc Ðông: "English sentences without overt grammatical subject", South Hanoi Institute of Technology, Hanoi, 1967

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    Thanks for this feedback. I like the idea of finding a sampling of porn sites in each language and analyzing the key words. I bet that would be more effective than trying to translate them.
    – user548971
    Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 19:58

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