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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

I have never understood why Chinese companies often have such hilariously bad English translations of their product instructions. Often the product quality is pretty good and the illustrations in the instructions are fine. But the English translation is terrible. There must be millions of Chinese people that speak decent English (in Hong Kong alone).

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It's not an explanation, but I know enough people who are convinced that they actually speak proper English, but most of the time it turns into grammatical gibberish, and they fail to realize that even when you point it out. If you're one of those people and think you are up for the job, and noone else proof-reads what you are actually doing... maybe this would result in this kind of instruction manual?

A Chinese guy I knew was studying for the TOEFL test and was memorizing all kinds of medical terms I'd never heard about, and yet, when he said goodbye he'd also say "I go first". At that time I had no idea why he did it, but as I learned more Mandarin it became clear that he just translated the phrase 我先走 (lit. I first go) which is very common when parting ways.

Point being, many study for tests but can't speak English.

Is "I go first" a correct translation? If so, why is it used? As an excuse that you have to leave earlier than the person you have been with? Or to avoid that uncomfortable situation where both parties aren't sure if it is time to leave, and are just standing around awkwardly?

It is! I’ve been watching a bunch of Asian TV shows lately and I’ve seen that phrase crop up in both Thai and Taiwanese shows. I had the same question so I asked a friend who’s Thai about it. She said it’s equivalent to “I should get going”, “I’m going to head out”, or something of that nature.

Wait, so it's more "I go now" than "I go first"?

Well the other person hasn’t gone.

When you see these things in foreign languages, it may seem odd. However, if you look at the origins of words and phrases in English, it is also full of odd expressions. It is just that you are used to them.

Take "welcome."[1] Well come. You've arrived well. You make a good entrance? Not a ridiculous thing to say when someone arrives.

What about in response to "Thank you?" You are welcome.[2] Huh? What does that mean?

Or, "you are welcome to take a second cookie." How does that translate into "I do not mind if you take a second cookie?"

[1] Welcome translates quite literally in other European languages. For example, in French, it is bienvenue - bien: well - venu: came.

[2] On the other hand, it is much more common to say de rien (in French) or de nada (in Spanish): literally, "it's nothing."

The origin of "welcome" seems to be "will come", not "well come". This is clear from the German version "Willkommen", which is closer to the original proto-germanic "wiljakumo" and is directly related to the rather dated German expression "Will [er/sie] kommen!" ("Let him/her in, or "Will he/she come [in]!"), or even to English "will ya come!". The connection of "will" and "come" signals the desire to receive the guest.

The french "bienvenue" seems to be a too-literal translation from wiljakumo [0]. A similar construction is missing in Latin.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bienvenue#Etymology

That underscores something about languages. They don't actually map 1:1 to each other. Whatever "I go first" means to speakers of Mandarin, we might only be able to approximate what that means in English.

An example that comes to mind is the oversimplification that happens when people say that the word "aloha" means "hello" and "goodbye". It only sort of does because that's how it is sometimes used. Really it's a whole concept that is unique to Hawaiian culture that would more accurately translate to "beloved" or "cherished".

"many study for tests but can't speak English." This is definitely true at least from my student days a long long while ago. However that particular perception, that english learners tend to translate what sounds natural in their language to an English equivalent, is a bit of a mystery to me.

I don't want to sound bragging, but I never translate languages in my head. If I do that it will feel like the equivalent of database searching with a query, I feel exhausted if I have to look for something phrase by phrase (or matching). I admit that when I'm writing or organising thoughts I have to go over words so searching does happen.

Obviously it is down to personal experiences...

This is just something that I read somewhere so don't take it at face value, maybe someone who knows the issue better can confirm or deny it. But I remember reading that in Asian countries like China and Japan, they tend to base the selection of translators on knowledge of the source language, not the target. That is, they get the translator with the best knowledge of Chinese even if their English is broken.

So is this basically saying that a grammatically incorrect, but factually correct translation is better than a grammatically perfect, but factually incorrect (as the source text was not understood) translation?

Finnish and Japanese language education focuses extensively on grammatical correctness and students get faulted for making grammatical mistakes.

In the Netherlands, correct grammar is only a small part of the final score, and what is given far more weight is how well one is able to understand the speaker and convey one's thoughts to the listener, and far more emphasis is placed on practicing conversations, even though they not be grammatically sound, which in Finland would be considered walking before having learned to crawl, but it seems to work.

Not just English. In my garage is a stepladder, with safety notices in English and Spanish. They are dated "May 20xx/Puede 20xx".

They just put the text in a local equivalent to Google Translate and that's it, no proofreading etc. There's a famous restaurant sign in China that says "Translation server error" on it: https://www.seriouseats.com/2008/07/translate-server-error-r...

There was an early translation program in China that was both popular and notoriously bad. For example, the simplified character 干 has a number of meanings, most commonly "dry", but the program would always pick "fuck" -- the end result being supermarket aisles with signs saying "Fuck Goods" and restaurants offering dishes like "Duck Fuck Noodles". Engrish.com (sic) has a whole category for these:

https://www.engrish.com/category/adult-engrish/

>They just put the text in a local equivalent to Google Translate and that's it, no proofreading etc.

I guess that is what they must be doing. But I still don't quite understand why they would spend thousands of dollars creating a product, tooling, packaging, instructions etc and then not spend, what, ~$100 getting a half-way decent translation.

I love the English language and I have a deep fear that this is the final destination for our language; that given demographics it will start to permanently reflect Mandarin translationisms, at least in the workplace. So many code reviews and design docs I deal with now are full of missing articles and tenses. I try to help with corrections but it can honestly start to feel like you're a big jerk in a code review if you're constantly correcting people's English.

It can be done better or worse - some of the best advice I got for teaching ESL was that if someone uses incorrect grammar, to simply repeat the clause with correct grammar and a 'go on?' tone. Immediate, low-friction feedback is one of the best ways to learn, what makes people think you're a jerk is if you call attention to their mistakes.

Of course, that's much easier in conversation than written communication. A good reason to make small talk with your co-workers.

I think they tend to be more expensive and thin in the ground in mainland China - Hong Kongers or native English speakers. That said Google translate does quite a decent job.

You need at least one person with at least basic English knowledge to know that the Chinese translation service is bad. (Google is blocked, remember.)

There are plenty of countries in which Google is not blocked, but knowledge of English is still relatively rare.

I forgot that Google was blocked in China.

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