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The Arabic in the header image is about as fucked up as possible. The letter ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). The word ordering is wrong (ltr instead
by zen_1 3y ago
The Arabic in the header image is about as fucked up as possible.
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
- LordShredda 3y agoThe image was probably made in photoshop. It's 2023 and some programs still can't render decent RTL unicode.
- BasedAnon 3y agobut GIMP can, score one for open source!
- gus_massa 3y agoThere is a site to explain the differences "Help! Is This Arabic?" https://isthisarabic.com/ https://isthisarabic.com/ HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 (635 points | 6 months ago | 299 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 (80 points | December 2021 | 20 comments)
- ComplexSystems 3y agoThis 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?
- distract8901 3y agoThis 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
- ilikeitdark 3y agoHere 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.
- cafard 3y agoThere 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.
- chaps 3y agoThis is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.
- noknownsender 3y agoLove that. I'm going to use this example for years.
- SenHeng 3y agoI 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%8B%B1%E8%AA%9E-%E3%81%AE%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%83%83%E3%83%81%E3%82%B3%E3%83%94%E3%83%BC-%E3%81%9D%E3%81%AE%E5%8A%9F%E7%BD%AA%E3%81%AF/427032 https://www.campaignjapan.com/article/%E5%A4%89%E3%81%AA%E8%...
- aaomidi 3y agoIt’s so fucking disappointing to keep seeing this happen. 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.
- racked 3y agoSheesh. The person who did it could not read Arabic. When does it stop being disrespectful and start becoming plain human error; if they make a mistake writing Thai? Hieroglyphs?
- aaomidi 3y agoI’m not blaming the individual who made it. I am blaming the entire process that led to this getting published.
- naniwaduni 3y agoSufficiently large corporations don't make human errors, they make quality control process errors.
- kanbara 3y agoi don't think it's the single event but the constant disregard for middle eastern cultures to the point where nobody even checks that a written text is correct. 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'
- remarkEon 3y agoI don't see errors like that because English is the lingua franca of business in the Western World, while Arabic is not. For your example to make sense you'd have to imagine an Arabic language paper doing the same for a publication based in, oh I don't know, Cairo or something. But, the thing is, I don't expect reciprocal cultural fluency of the West in the Middle East, nor should I. Moreover, I don't resent them for it. Someone made a mistake at The Guardian - a foolish one that shouldn't have made it past an editor - but it's not "constant disregard for middle eastern cultures" that this happened. For what it's worth, I can read Arabic script (but don't speak the language) and I caught the error.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Adverblessly 3y agoSome time ago I encountered an imported vending machine here in Israel. It had a touch screen with a prompt in Hebrew to interact with it that: 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 So imagine seeing the following interaction prompt on a vending machine: kildlouwi eviecerote Took quite a while to decipher!
- loa_in_ 3y agoSpoiler: it's one of these 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
- cafard 3y agohttps://www.timesofisrael.com/the-bbcs-hebrew-boo-boo/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-bbcs-hebrew-boo-boo/
- switch007 3y agoThe Grauniad struggles with English all the time, what did you expect lol