The letter ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). The word ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). Somehow they also managed to get the letters not to connect to each other.
Great job Guardian! 10/10
The people who make these products have to spend millions and millions of dollars setting up factories, hiring people, putting things into production, etc. But somehow they don't have a budget for a bilingual college student intern to translate a bunch of copy to English better than "using this product will bring a great joy." Why? I would be super interested in some journalist figuring out why this happens.
Of course, there's always the viewpoint of "why would they need to translate better? It's just money that they don't need to spend, and this works for their business." So I will make a super strong claim: ChatGPT can now do nearly perfect mass translations of this stuff for free, in theory simultaneously increasing translation quality and reducing costs. Despite this, for whatever reason, I predict that the average translation quality on Amazon won't improve within the next few years.
Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?
Hell, when I was a game dev, in a studio of less than 50 people we had a sudden and huge demand to port our game to China. It was a Czech studio making a game in English that was being translated to Mandarin. It cost us one single person, his entire job was translating text files we sent him and managing our China social media presence.
It absolutely boggles the mind that these Chinese companies can't or won't hire a single English-speaking copyeditor
I'm going to use this example for years.
Let’s pretend for a moment that writing marketing copy is something everyone can just magically do. Your problem is now you have to explain to your superiors that direct word for word translation doesn’t work, that some phrases don’t exist in English, or that made up Engrish words can’t just be slot into English sentences [0]
[0]: Enjoy the girl! https://www.campaignjapan.com/article/%E5%A4%89%E3%81%AA%E8%...
I see. That's gotta be hard in a setting where a superior is always right and knows it all by default, even if they don't. I can imagine all the hard work you'd have to go through to manipulate the superior to think it was them who knew about the problem and came up with a solution. Definitely not worth it for just about anyone, let alone an intern.
I've actually considered whether this is a business opportunity, but concluded that there's really no way a business can demonstrate value over whoever is currently doing the crappy translation.
Actually, forget cheap Asian consumer products.
I've seen actual academics (eg. Sinologists from the "West") totally misunderstand classical Chinese texts (I forgot the details, sorry). On a related note, a lot of the English "Confucious quotes" floating on the Internet are quite funny, and it's often a fun exercise to determine where the quote came from, or whether it was completely made up. I mean, just imagine you're making a product and wanted to localize it for the China market, you might even be tempted to demonstrate your knowledge of the target demographics by asking the team to add a Confucius quote you saw (which is fake). Now at this point you better hope you got a really good translator who actually knows the Analects by heart and could find a suitable quote to substitute.
"daughter, i have fed you and paid for your education all these years, translate this!"
"yes, dad"
my point being, might not be budget constraints so much as, look, dad's arms are too short to reach the change in his pockets
1. Had reverse letter ordering (ltr instead of rtl)
2. Had reverse word ordering (ltr instead of rtl)
3. Had no spaces between words
4. Broke words across line boundaries
5. Made sense semantically (sort of), but didn't make sense in context
kildlouwi
eviecerote
Obfuscated intentionally
Dog park and the more Receive your product Stolen from the following To receive I would like Tire on the other hand Dagger I am not parent Duck to the same role
It shows a lack of care, empathy, and diversity from every organization that makes this mistake.
It completely nullifies every point they were making.
I remember Google made this same fuck up on a segment in IO when they were talking about how many languages they’re supporting.
It’s disgraceful and just outright disrespectful.
imagine if everywhere you went you saw english test like "helo, how you are?" and all sorts of weird grammatical issues, spaces wrongly inserted. if this was your entire life in the west you'd feel pretty alienated too, especially when people were doing so as an act of 'inclusion'
For what it's worth, I can read Arabic script (but don't speak the language) and I caught the error.
Yet for most English speakers, it is at worst amusing and mostly is just appreciated as indicating interest.