Thursday, July 21, 2011

Embarrassing Ignorance or Carelessness

Too often in popular Facebook games, there are embarrassing instances of misspellings. Granted that it is likely that English is not the native tongue of many of the developers, but surely the concept of EDITING is not entirely defunct. In this screenshot, a new fantasy Tree is shown with its name. 'Fleur de Les' is a meaningless name. In French, the words mean 'Flower of the'. Obviously, the intention was to give the traditional symbol of France its proper name, which can be spelled either 'Fleur-de-lis' or 'Fleur-de-lys' but NOT 'Fleur-de-les'. 'Fleur-de-lys' or 'Fleur-de-lys' means 'Flower of the Lily' or 'Lily Flower' in French. It is a very old heraldic device that became common in France during the Middle Ages.

How can such carelessness be tolerated by Zynga, a company that quickly is becoming quite famous for its online games? It could not be THAT difficult to make certain that some one fluent in the language read all text before its release. I understand that these games are available in a multitude of different languages but the amount of text is not significant and surely an appearance of basic literacy in EVERY language used should be important to the makers.

23 July: Zynga fixed the misspelling of the 'Fleur-de-Lys' Tree yesterday. I have no idea if some one from Zynga read this post or if the action were undertaken entirely by coincidence. Whatever the case, I am happy to see the correction. Each time I obtained a 'Fleur-de-les' Tree, I was rather uncomfortable with it.

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