Carrier Telstra bars off sailor talk on voice-to-text messages from its network, replacing the F and C bombs of the English language with long dashes.
Such censorship is not unprecedented, as Apple has been changing the F word to "duck" on preemptive text messages since the iPhones emerged. But the Australia-based carrier had bigger plans, completely blocking out expletives.
Back in June 2012, Telstra banned certain words, and then in July 2013, the carrier added more to its growing list of naughty words, where more words are thrown in on a yearly basis.
"A small number of offensive words are omitted from our voice to text translations. This practice has been in place for a number of years and is based on feedback from our customers," a Telstra spokesperson says.
The difference this time is that Telstra opted to use symbols as the substitutes for swear words instead of automatically rewording them like in Apple's case. This development may entail more effort on the users' part to decipher the meaning of the censored words.
To sum things up, Telstra frowns upon expletives, and then the company added the two biggest curses of the English language to its expanding list of banned words and set its system to automatically translate them into a long series of dashes.
In other words, sailor mouths out there are better off to take their swear words elsewhere, as Telstra is not going to take any s---.
Incidentally, perhaps McDonald's minions could learn a thing or two from Telstra's practice, as some of them may have developed a bit of a potty mouth.
"[W]e apologize for any confusion or offense to those who may have interpreted the sounds as anything other than gibberish," a McDonald's representative explains. But wait a minute, did he just call "Minionese" gibberish?
At any rate, various companies across industries are working on toning down expletives, and Telstra just took a huge leap forward.
