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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

While the breach is a reminder that people don’t have good security practices, piling on or focusing on the words ‘breed’ and ‘ready’ shows how eager journalism is to jump on something that isn’t quite fleshed out.

First, they don’t know if it’s governmental or otherwise, second they’re not sure if the words are mistranslations or a shorthand categorization.

The government is concerned the population drop will happen too fast and are also concerned some men will have issues finding a partner due to previous reproductive policies. These latter issues are socially graver issues that could be discussed at length but the article instead decided to focus on speculation.

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> First, they don’t know if it’s governmental or otherwise

There is no otherwise.

> The government is concerned

You can't just use this—or safety—to justify anything.

I don't understand is it government database or private company's database?

Or they could publish the actual term used so that anybody could check, but they didn't. But they use Beijing written in the characters, as if it was the important part.

The actual term in the database is "BreedReady". The article translated "北京市" into Beijing because readers probably speak English and not Chinese.

"Mistranslation" to me implies something that was originally written in another language.

Since the database is Chinese, it's fair to assume that the people who came up with the keys are native Chinese speakers, and thus would have translated the concept they wanted to express into English to get ASCII-only keys, and came up with "BreedReady".

It's not just speculation, the fact is the database is Chinese and the key is "BreedReady". I don't find it that difficult to understand how it could have ended up like that.

Oh. No you don't translate when you speak another language, you may be worse at speaking it than your native one, but speaking any language works the same way, you speak or write directly and don't translate.

It still could be a translation to keep the keys in English though.

Let’s say there was a database you were setting up and it only accepted Chinese keys. You have the keys in you head type the into a language to Chinese translator and you use that. You likely aren’t going to check for correctness, whether it’s polite, slang, or jargon. You just use whatever came up. That’s the “mistranslation”.

They wrote Beijing as 北京市 because that's how it showed up in the database. But they also wrote "BreedReady" because that's how that key also showed up in the database; all the DB keys are English, apparently (https://twitter.com/0xDUDE/status/1104482014202351616). I'd assume it's designed around good ol' fashion fear that not all languages accessing the DB are Unicode-capable for labels and identifiers.

NextWeb's reporting on the Twitter thread suggests that the phrase may be a Chinese attempt to translate to English a Chinese word meaning "woman of child-bearing age" [https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/03/11/1-8m-chinese-women-de...], but we don't actually know because we have no primary source on what character was translated as "BreedReady."

"Mistranslation" to me implies something that was originally written in another language. Not somebody speaking poor English.

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