Campaign out to get autocorrect to change its ways

● What’s in a name? Just ask Nando’s, which is fired up on the subject.

When the chicken franchise noticed that online spell checkers still treated its name as a mistake after 30 years in business, its feathers were ruffled.

It got the company thinking about other South African names that were treated as mistakes, and it decided to do something about it by launching the #rightmyname campaign.

In a 30-second video posted on social media platforms, Nando’s takes on spell checkers and autocorrect functions to make sure South African names such as Tshilidzi, Tshedimotso, Nawaal and Kobus are recognised by local writing apps.

On Human Rights Day, South Africans will be able to download the list and update their computers’ internal dictionary so that their names won’t ever again be underlined in the text to signify a spelling error. The Nando’s punchline is “You’re not a mistake”.

“Nando’s started the campaign to address a challenge within the organisation, where South African names, including Nando’s and PERi-PERi [its house sauce], were highlighted as errors by spell check,” said Doug Place, chief marketing officer of Nando’s Southern Africa.

“Based on the need and response internally, Nando’s decided to take this to the public so that every South African can no longer have their name appear as an error.”

More than 12 000 names have been added so far and the list is growing.

“Why are names like Nokuthula, Elodie, Darawees and Tebatso . . . highlighted as mistakes too? Not cool,” he said.

The video has reached more than 750 000 people, with approximately 2 500 reactions on Facebook.

You can add your name at rightmyname.co.za