How often have you typed a name that isn’t Anglo-Saxon in origin only to have tech devices inform you that it’s actually wrong by showing a red zigzag line underneath? The list is endless, but some examples include Deepika becoming Deepest and Soha becoming Sofa due to autocorrect. Now, many people in the UK who have had their names incorrectly translated by autocorrect have pleaded with IT firms to finally address the issue. As part of the “I am not a typo” campaign, people with Welsh, Irish and Indian names are some of those requesting changes to the computer and phone operating systems.
According to a report by The Guardian, Savan-Chandni Gandecha, one of the participants, had their name autocorrected to “Satan”. The British daily newspaper was informed by Gandecha that “it is important that technology becomes more inclusive.”
The British Indian content creator also expressed her annoyance at having their name automatically altered to Savan or having internet forms reject the hyphen. “Even in India my name gets corrected to ‘Sawan’, and it’s not just an English issue. It’s a multi-language thing,” the person added.
According to reports, the campaign claimed that when checked in Microsoft’s English dictionary, four out of 10 baby names born in England and Wales in 2021 were marked as “wrong” or “not accepted.”
The campaign group, which was founded by a group of individuals employed in London’s creative sectors, sent an open letter to IT companies pointing out that 2,328 persons with the name Esmae were born between 2017 and 2021, compared to 36 Nigels. Although Nigel is unchanged, Esmae is autocorrected to Admar.
According to Gandecha, autocorrect favours Western and white names even though the general majority has a wide variety of names.
A non-profit group called People Like Us launched a billboard campaign last year that called attention to autocorrect bias favouring British origin and connected the matter to the ethnic wage gap.
Supporters of the most recent initiative include Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the US, whose name is occasionally autocorrected to Sashimi.
Dyal-Chand discovered that computer software either corrected names to the closest Anglo name—for example, turning Ayaan to Susan — or to different terms entirely — for example, DeShawn to “dash away” — in a research paper titled Autocorrecting for Whiteness. In an interview with The Guardian, she said that autocorrect is neither useful nor handy for those with names like hers. “It is unhelpful. And yes – it is harmful,” the person added.
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