Comment by ComplexSystems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComplexSystems | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't exactly the same, but someone needs to make a similar site for English text for products being exported from Asian countries. It is totally baffling to me just how bad the Engrish is on some of these products I get on Amazon: product specs, manuals, and etc vary from "slightly off" to "almost unreadable." It's actually something I have been curious about for a long time: why is it like this?

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?

I have been that bilingual intern tasked to translate multiple marketing material into English.

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%...

> explain to your superiors that direct word for word translation doesn’t work

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.

This has been bugging me for years. The cost of a translator is basically insignificant, it's just one salary, it's a drop in the ocean of a corporate budget.

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

Here in Spain too. A while back in Barcelona it was "Year of the Book" with events all year, in many kinds of places, celebrating books and reading. The even created a free book, to cover all the things they were doing. But the English in the book was HORRIBLE. And it still is on many government websites, tourist things, trains and buses etc. Such a bad LOOK.

There is a stepladder in our garage. The documentation pasted to it has text in English and Spanish, right down to the date: May 20xx/Puede 20xx.

Love that.

I'm going to use this example for years.

This is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.

The language divide is real. While in theory you could hire a person to translate the text from Chinese/Japanese/etc. to English, the fact is that they don't really have a good way to check the quality of the translation, and this is the problem. Obviously, they already paid somebody to do the translation otherwise it wouldn't be in English in the first place (not really that many actually use Google translate). But how would a budget restricted Chinese manufacturer firm check the quality of a translation without getting into an infinite regress problem? I mean, anyone can claim to be a bilingual college student, but finding one that's actually fluent in English in China is hard. And they usually have better job opportunities than translating a meaningless user manual for chump change. (It's a supply and demand problem.)

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.

> Obviously, they already paid somebody to do the translation

"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

I think you vastly overestimate how much it costs to get to product in China for most of the stuff you see on Amazon. They don't build factories, they rent factory time, and these companies often only consist of a maximum of 10 people. English-language skills aren't that wide-spread in China, so it is probably one person knowing a little bit and claiming they can translate everything.

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