Question: When is a missing dot not just a missing dot?
Answer: When it leads to this:
The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)
The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “?” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.
The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “s?k?s?nca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are f****** you” (sounds familiar too.)
Emine then showed the message to her father, who – enraged – called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.
Injured and bleeding, with a knife on his chest, Ramazan tried to escape. Emine was still trying to finish him on the door, but he managed to take the knife out of his chest and attacked back, wounding her. Ramazan finally escaped, and was caught by the police, but Emine bleed to dead as the family waited for an ambulance to cross Ankara’s hellish traffic to reach their home.
Confused by all the events, he later killed himself in jail.
Apparently it’s not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing “serious problems” when it comes to certain “delicate words” in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.
Of course, you can’t blame this all on the technology. After all, it seems that Emine and her family may have also been a dot short of a good localization.
So to speak.
