As you read this, millions of Internet users are visiting their favourite websites and finding that their owners are conducting their own protest against SOPA and PIPA.
The bills are currently being presented to U.S Congress to stop piracy but may also threaten the Internet freedoms of these users around the world.
Google’s logo has gone dark and Wikipedia is no longer serving its content, all in the name of standing up against them.
But what does SOPA mean? To English speakers, it’s an acronym for Stop Online Piracy Act, but in other countries the word has quite a different meaning — some being especially relevant.
We took to Twitter to ask what SOPA or sopa meant in different languages around the world, these were the results:
- In Swedish: Rubbish
- In Greek: Shut up, be quiet
- In Estonian: “Sopa” is a genitive of word “sopp”, which translated into English, is “muck”
- In Spanish: Soup
- In Filipino: Sofa
- In Icelandic: Sip
- In Romanian: Whisper
- In Slovenian: Cluster
- In Indian (Marathi): Easy
- In Turkish: Stick, or bat.
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“Rubbish”, “shut up” and “muck” — you could certainly say they bear some relevance to the bill that has so many people talking about it.
What does “sopa” mean where you are from? We’d love to see it.
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