On: Baidu Hires Andrew Ng

[cliveowen]

shitu, not the best choice of word.

[btian → cliveowen]

It makes perfect sense in Mandarin, and since it's a Chinese site, I'll call it a reasonable choice of word.

[seanmcdirmid → btian]

I'm sure we could form a pejorative from it. Like 你是土, pinyin is just so ambiguous.

[yen223 → seanmcdirmid]

你是吐, for when you want to look for a spitting image of yourself ;)

[yeukhon → cliveowen]

It means "learn picture" in Chinese. It's in the title. 識圖 even though the pinyin is not that pleasant to people who knows English, Baidu is a Chinese search engine and most of the users are Chinese speaking users. Furthermore, as a Chinese speaking person I can well make fun of it by saying "shxt" every time the engine spits out the right image!

[seanmcdirmid → yeukhon]

Well, to be fair, Baidu is going to use simplified characters, not traditional ones, given their mainland focus.

[yeukhon → seanmcdirmid]

Yes I am aware of that. I just happen to be a Traditional Chinese writer :D but either writing system shouldn't matter.

[vvvv → cliveowen]

I don't know why you got donwvoted, your comment is perfectly valid. Plenty of case studies about Anglo-Saxons making silly linguistic faux pas in other countries, including China. China has a huge domestic market but the companies there will eventually also have business case studies warning against "shitty" linguistic mistakes ;)

[ewoodrich → vvvv]

This, however, is a site in Mandarin targeted at Chinese. "Shitu" is not intended for Western markets, it just happens to appear in Latin script in a URI.