[hnfong]

The language divide is real. While in theory you could hire a person to translate the text from Chinese/Japanese/etc. to English, the fact is that they don't really have a good way to check the quality of the translation, and this is the problem. Obviously, they already paid somebody to do the translation otherwise it wouldn't be in English in the first place (not really that many actually use Google translate). But how would a budget restricted Chinese manufacturer firm check the quality of a translation without getting into an infinite regress problem? I mean, anyone can claim to be a bilingual college student, but finding one that's actually fluent in English in China is hard. And they usually have better job opportunities than translating a meaningless user manual for chump change. (It's a supply and demand problem.)

I've actually considered whether this is a business opportunity, but concluded that there's really no way a business can demonstrate value over whoever is currently doing the crappy translation.

Actually, forget cheap Asian consumer products.

I've seen actual academics (eg. Sinologists from the "West") totally misunderstand classical Chinese texts (I forgot the details, sorry). On a related note, a lot of the English "Confucious quotes" floating on the Internet are quite funny, and it's often a fun exercise to determine where the quote came from, or whether it was completely made up. I mean, just imagine you're making a product and wanted to localize it for the China market, you might even be tempted to demonstrate your knowledge of the target demographics by asking the team to add a Confucius quote you saw (which is fake). Now at this point you better hope you got a really good translator who actually knows the Analects by heart and could find a suitable quote to substitute.

[fsckboy]

> Obviously, they already paid somebody to do the translation

"daughter, i have fed you and paid for your education all these years, translate this!"

"yes, dad"

my point being, might not be budget constraints so much as, look, dad's arms are too short to reach the change in his pockets