[lksaar]

I have a similar experience as a german on the internet.

Aliexpress (straight up wrong translations), Discord (anglicism, adjective ordering and weird sentence/tone structures) and plenty of others I don't remember, the list is pretty long. Size doesn't really seem play an effect aswell.

Another big issue are potential bugs you encounter. If you just get a translated error message without any error number or something similar it's a very frustrating experience to troubleshoot it. I've spend quite some time retranslating error messages to solve issues. Add to it that often knowledge bases are outdated in the translated languages.

[andruby]

Aliexpress in Dutch is lovely!

Plenty of items on Aliexpress can be shipped from multiple locations. "China" is almost always one of the options. Well, in Dutch they've translated that to "Porselein". That is a valid translation, if you are talking about plates and dishes made from porcelain)

I wonder how actively harmful this bad translation is to their business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_(material)

screenshot: https://fransdejonge.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Screensh...

[seszett]

Weird, I sometimes get the French translation of AliExpress (when my cookie expires I suppose) and I haven't noticed "China" being translated as Porcelaine in French. I wonder why it's different. Also now I wonder why I get the French version, since I live in Flanders (although I'm a French speaker).

AliExpress translations are totally incomprehensible though anyway. I really don't think they should show the translated versions by default.

(By the way, your second link doesn't respond for me)

[d1sxeyes]

"Ships from" though is perfect Dutch.

[chrismorgan]

> Size doesn't really seem play an effect aswell.

This holds true in all areas of software development—nay, in business in general. To the point where I’m not really sure why people do expect large players to do a good job, because they just about never do.

Large organisations are very close to incapable of producing good results—their software will be clunky and slow, their translations present but bad, their customer support painful. Small organisations are more likely to be able to produce good results. Notwithstanding this, small enterprises are often unable to match large for certain resource availability (including time!), which acts as a balancing factor so that small is not often uniformly superior to large, though it’s much more likely to be superior in a certain subset of fields; and this is the case with i18n/l10n.

I think this actually stands to very simple reason when examined numerically: have enough mass and you’ll produce average results (regression to the mean); be small and you’re more likely to deviate from the mean, whether for good or for bad, and if for bad you’re more likely to fail, so you’ll tend to end up with more above-average small players.