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I live in Japan, and when you read English texts here (it doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant menu, a pamphlet at a touristic area, a flyer for local gov
by gyomu 1y ago
I live in Japan, and when you read English texts here (it doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant menu, a pamphlet at a touristic area, a flyer for local government services…) the same English word will often be written differently within the same document (eg for a recent one I saw: “curbside” was spelled “crubside” and “carbside”).
I always wonder how that happens, because the documents themselves often smell strongly of machine translation - but if they’re machine translated, how would those mistakes get in? My best guess is that there’s a human manually typing out a machine translation output, which kind of boggles the mind.
I think us computer nerds who are used to using computers to do work efficiently have a hard time imagining all the weird ways in which non-computer nerds actually use computers.
- numpad0 1y agoSometimes they are machine translated by someone who doesn't understand Ctrl+C shortcut if it's longer than 10 words, but equally often they're just hand kneaded. Japanese English education is effectively machine translation with human brains as machines - we're not actually taught English at all[0], just memorized technical rulesets that yield predictable garbage. A lot of weird "Engrish" text is likely result of that. 0: That's supposed to be drastically changing, we'll see if it does. English skills is still a resume stuffer in Japan.