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Comment by noufalibrahim | Hacker News Reader

The main thing here is knowledge of the language. Given how widespread Arabic is (though perhaps not so much in the gaming ecosystem which is Rami's area), it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations.

I encountered a (sort of) similar problem while rendering Devanagari text and wouldn't have realised If I couldn't read the text https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44254171/devanagari-text...

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> it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations

Speaking about translations, I had. Laughable experience when I was experimenting with Google translate API a few years ago, when I picked some random text about solar system from Wikipedia that reads something like “Mercury is a planet of the solar system”, when translated to Arabic, it read “الزئبق هو أحد كواكب المجموعة الشمسية” , apparently, it was not be able to infer the meaning of “Mercury” from the context.

When I translate that with safari it comes back as ‘mercury is one of the planets in the solar system’?

In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.

"Quicksilver is one of the planets in the solar system."

This is the problem with machine translation, often a round trip gets you back something that looks reasonable.

Some of them let you click on each word and see which it picked, but that doesn't always work.

Although I’ve never tried it, I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to find an editor for the specific language to take a look at it. I doubt they need that many hours of work from the editor for it to be a significant expense.

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