Microsoft Corp doesn’t seem to be a good chooser when it comes to buying things in rather than developing them – the original Q-DOS Quick & Dirty Operating System that evolved in MS-DOS was inferior to CP/M in almost every point where it differed, and Microsoft clearly needs to be more careful when it comes to buying in foreign-language Thesauri – perhaps having someone that speaks the language to read the thing through first might help: at all events, the company has been in hot water in Spain, and finds the Mexicans even more touchy, so much so that it has had to take out full page advertisements there to apologise for the thesaurus in Word 6.0 Spanish Edition, which suggests as alternative to Indian, man-eater or savage; for Western, says Aryan, white and civilized, the Spanish word for bastard is offered as a synonym for people of mixed race, and it equates Lesbian with pervert and depraved person; the company is having to dispatch a language expert this week from its software development center in Ireland to discuss changes to the thesaurus with El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico’s most august cultural body, but it doesn’t make it alright to say, as Ignacio Blum, Microsoft Mexico’s product manager for office products, told Reuters, If you check these words in most dictionaries, you will find the same definitions, a sentiment echoed by a flack in Redmond, who assured Dow Jones & Co, If you went and bought a printed dictionary in Mexico today you would find some of these mistakes or errors.
