[zen_1]

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

[gus_massa]

There is a site to explain the differences "Help! Is This Arabic?" https://isthisarabic.com/ HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 (635 points | 6 months ago | 299 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 (80 points | December 2021 | 20 comments)

[ComplexSystems]

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?

[Adverblessly]

Some 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!

[cafard]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-bbcs-hebrew-boo-boo/

[loa_in_]

Spoiler: 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

[LordShredda]

The image was probably made in photoshop. It's 2023 and some programs still can't render decent RTL unicode.

[BasedAnon]

but GIMP can, score one for open source!

[switch007]

The Grauniad struggles with English all the time, what did you expect lol

[aaomidi]

It’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.

[dotnet00]

Eh, I disagree. It's no different from the way all sorts of Asian clothing brands just put random English words in places or how many of their songs just have English bits which have glaring errors or outright don't make sense. They don't actually know English but they think it's cool and thus do that (or similarly in the West with Japanese/Chinese characters).

Yet for most English speakers, it is at worst amusing and mostly is just appreciated as indicating interest.

[syndicatedjelly]

This is the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater

[racked]

Sheesh. 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?