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That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.

Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.

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You may not be aware that it's a false friend. The German word Billion exists, and it means trillion.

So the German reader will read the English article (in English, not auto-translated), see the word billion, think “oh that looks familiar” and might assume it means the same as the German word Billion.

Machine translation makes quite a few mistakes, so I think if you have some decent knowledge of a language, you might be better off reading the original rather than a machine translation. At least my point of view from a couple of years ago. But it's also possible that machine translation has gotten WAY better in the last couple of years, I'm not sure.

Thanks. Interesting.

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