19 ms·

Ali, what’s up

152 points by roywashere 4y ago

shimonabi 4y ago
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.
anoncow 4y ago
The page is slashdotted.
- blenderdt 4y ago
  Edit: ah yes, you are talking about the blog..
  - fudgefactorfive 4y ago
    I think he meant the blog post hosted by Michiel, not AliExpress the massive conglomerate…
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I think parent comment is about the blog, not Aliexpress.
phoe-krk 4y ago
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.
- N-Krause 4y ago
  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.
buro9 4y ago
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?
- ammo1662 4y ago
  It seems to. The placeholder and popular search are different for differnet languages. You can switch to Deutsch and try to translate the page.
- seydor 4y ago
  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
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  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?
  - netsharc 4y ago
    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...
  - 4y ago
unwind 4y ago
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).
- drcongo 4y ago
  Searching for "weird handtools" might be why you're getting those results.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  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.
kubanczyk 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220506081417/https://huntingbears.nl/2022/05/05/ali-whats-up/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220506081417/https://huntingbe...
- jaykk 4y ago
  thanks!
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stingraycharles 4y 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-DB97307332.jpg 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 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sf/xps-laptops )
- sturza 4y ago
  I get the same “Accept everyone”.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    Sounds like what bad translator might make of "accept all" [cookies/terms]
- klohto 4y ago
  “Embrace all” That’s the spirit
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  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.
  - marvin 4y ago
    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.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    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.
netsharc 4y ago
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?
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  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.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  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
lvice 4y ago
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.
m_eiman 4y ago
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!
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gsmgo 4y ago
confirmed in spanish
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
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.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Yep, and they probably have a "bad word" filter for english, chinese and maybe spanish, while they let all the other languages go through.
  - flurdy 4y ago
    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.
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    They assuredly do not have one for English -- "sex panties" and "dildo" are just as common for English placeholders.
    - 3np 4y ago
      Neither of those sound like "bad words"? Notable absence of "fuck panties".
- xaitv 4y ago
  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).
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nottorp 4y ago
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Someone probably didn't know to translate "sexy party dress" or something like that.
- hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
  The "popular search term" theory also fits with incompetence since it's automation run wild :)
- bambax 4y ago
  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.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    > 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.
k_sze 4y ago
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)
- plonk 4y ago
  > "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.
- oefrha 4y ago
  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.
  - JPLeRouzic 4y ago
    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"
    - paradite 4y ago
      i remember reading something similar (unit conversion) on HN. Maybe someone can link.
    - rypskar 4y ago
      Maybe because France use the long scale, so a billion is a million millions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#French-speaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#French-sp...
the_third_wave 4y ago
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.
- Macuyiko 4y ago
  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'.
thehias 4y ago
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
rambambram 4y ago
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.
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cyberpunk 4y ago
My favourite translation error lately was this one: https://imgur.com/a/C8zV5Do 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
- fer 4y ago
  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.
  - felurx 4y ago
    Afaik Telegram just uses Google Translate for that feature. Could you maybe try copying a message where that happens into Google Translate?
- KMnO4 4y ago
  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”.
kauguste281 4y ago
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.
- roywashere 4y ago
  Aliexpress does not sell women afaik
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    They are probably looking to expand into the market vacuum left by Silk Road, lol Next week they will do 'medications'?
- hnbad 4y ago
  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.
  - kauguste281 4y ago
    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.
krono 4y ago
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!
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  One day when you are lost and i jured in a forest, who will find you? An aliexprress seller!
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larrysalibra 4y ago
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 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 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!
- yongjik 4y ago
  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.
- tempodox 4y ago
  Funny, Google Translate renders “扒饭” as “grilled rice”. Never trust an automated translation if you don't know both languages.
  - yakkomajuri 4y ago
    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)
    - HidyBush 4y ago
      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.
superjan 4y ago
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.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  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%2Fserver%20database https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=client%2Fser...
vsnf 4y ago
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.
- the_origami_fox 4y ago
  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.
- Conlectus 4y ago
  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.
  - vsnf 4y ago
    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.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      "neukende vrouwen" means "women fucking" in Dutch. "Höschen für ficken" means panties for fucking in German. As you see, a hint is enough :P
    - rmetzler 4y ago
      It means „Panties for fucking“.
    - paulluuk 4y ago
      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.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Yeah I noticed the same last night. The search suggestions are also wildly... suggestive
hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
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.
- zen_of_prog 4y ago
  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.
qwerty456127 4y ago
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.
- kevincox 4y ago
  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.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    > 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?
nextstep 4y ago
This isn’t really NSFW in DE… many shopping sites will show erotic items of the main page.
ralfn 4y ago
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.
can16358p 4y ago
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.
nicolas_t 4y ago
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.
- temp8964 4y ago
  > 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.
davemtl 4y ago
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/1178139459625345024/photo/1 https://twitter.com/DavieDavieDave/status/117813945962534502...
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
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.
- user_7832 4y ago
  > 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)
  - kroltan 4y ago
    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.
junon 4y ago
Mine defaults to German and states "Vibrators" (in German).
MarkusWandel 4y ago
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.
Fnoord 4y ago
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.
beanders 4y ago
Definitely something strange going on haha… at the moment, en-us, I see “frontal wig human hair”
gunfighthacksaw 4y ago
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.
FR10 4y ago
Ive seen this exactly in the Spanish language (es-PE) version too. You also get suggestions that literally include XXX and other key terms
raarts 4y ago
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..
joshspankit 4y ago

152 points by roywashere 4y ago

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.

anoncow 4y ago

The page is slashdotted.

blenderdt 4y ago
Edit: ah yes, you are talking about the blog..
- fudgefactorfive 4y ago
  I think he meant the blog post hosted by Michiel, not AliExpress the massive conglomerate…
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think parent comment is about the blog, not Aliexpress.

phoe-krk 4y ago

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.

N-Krause 4y ago
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.

buro9 4y ago

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?

ammo1662 4y ago
It seems to. The placeholder and popular search are different for differnet languages. You can switch to Deutsch and try to translate the page.
seydor 4y ago
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
iforgotpassword 4y ago
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?
- netsharc 4y ago
  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...
- 4y ago

unwind 4y ago

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).

drcongo 4y ago
Searching for "weird handtools" might be why you're getting those results.
joshspankit 4y ago
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.

kubanczyk 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220506081417/https://huntingbears.nl/2022/05/05/ali-whats-up/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220506081417/https://huntingbe...

jaykk 4y ago
thanks!

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stingraycharles 4y 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-DB97307332.jpg 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 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sf/xps-laptops )

sturza 4y ago
I get the same “Accept everyone”.
- Aachen 4y ago
  Sounds like what bad translator might make of "accept all" [cookies/terms]
klohto 4y ago
“Embrace all” That’s the spirit
plaguepilled 4y ago
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.
- marvin 4y ago
  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.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  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.

netsharc 4y ago

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?

thrdbndndn 4y ago
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.
magicalhippo 4y ago
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

lvice 4y ago

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.

m_eiman 4y ago

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!

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gsmgo 4y ago

confirmed in spanish

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

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.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Yep, and they probably have a "bad word" filter for english, chinese and maybe spanish, while they let all the other languages go through.
- flurdy 4y ago
  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.
- freeone3000 4y ago
  They assuredly do not have one for English -- "sex panties" and "dildo" are just as common for English placeholders.
  - 3np 4y ago
    Neither of those sound like "bad words"? Notable absence of "fuck panties".
xaitv 4y ago
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).

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nottorp 4y ago

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

hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
The "popular search term" theory also fits with incompetence since it's automation run wild :)
bambax 4y ago
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.
- nottorp 4y ago
  > 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.

k_sze 4y ago

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)

plonk 4y ago
> "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.
oefrha 4y ago
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.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  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"
  - paradite 4y ago
    i remember reading something similar (unit conversion) on HN. Maybe someone can link.
  - rypskar 4y ago
    Maybe because France use the long scale, so a billion is a million millions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#French-speaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale#French-sp...

the_third_wave 4y ago

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.

Macuyiko 4y ago
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'.

thehias 4y ago

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

rambambram 4y ago

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.

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cyberpunk 4y ago

My favourite translation error lately was this one: https://imgur.com/a/C8zV5Do 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

fer 4y ago
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.
- felurx 4y ago
  Afaik Telegram just uses Google Translate for that feature. Could you maybe try copying a message where that happens into Google Translate?
KMnO4 4y ago
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”.

kauguste281 4y ago

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.

roywashere 4y ago
Aliexpress does not sell women afaik
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  They are probably looking to expand into the market vacuum left by Silk Road, lol Next week they will do 'medications'?
hnbad 4y ago
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.
- kauguste281 4y ago
  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.

krono 4y ago

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!

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
One day when you are lost and i jured in a forest, who will find you? An aliexprress seller!
- deleted 4y ago
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larrysalibra 4y ago

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 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 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!

yongjik 4y ago
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.
tempodox 4y ago
Funny, Google Translate renders “扒饭” as “grilled rice”. Never trust an automated translation if you don't know both languages.
- yakkomajuri 4y ago
  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)
  - HidyBush 4y ago
    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.

superjan 4y ago

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.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
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%2Fserver%20database https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=client%2Fser...

vsnf 4y ago

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.

the_origami_fox 4y ago
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.
Conlectus 4y ago
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.
- vsnf 4y ago
  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.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    "neukende vrouwen" means "women fucking" in Dutch. "Höschen für ficken" means panties for fucking in German. As you see, a hint is enough :P
  - rmetzler 4y ago
    It means „Panties for fucking“.
  - paulluuk 4y ago
    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.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

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

hrdwdmrbl 4y ago

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.

zen_of_prog 4y ago
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.

qwerty456127 4y ago

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.

kevincox 4y ago
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.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  > 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?

nextstep 4y ago

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

ralfn 4y ago

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.

can16358p 4y ago

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.

nicolas_t 4y ago

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.

temp8964 4y ago
> 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.

davemtl 4y ago

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/1178139459625345024/photo/1 https://twitter.com/DavieDavieDave/status/117813945962534502...

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

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.

user_7832 4y ago
> 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)
- kroltan 4y ago
  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.

junon 4y ago

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

MarkusWandel 4y ago

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.

Fnoord 4y ago

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.

beanders 4y ago

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

gunfighthacksaw 4y ago

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.

FR10 4y ago

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

raarts 4y ago

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..

joshspankit 4y ago