I always find it hard to take things seriously when they are written in poor english. "Will coming soon" makes me worry about the quality of the rest of the project, maybe more than I should.
Next time you translate your website to Chinese let us know how it goes. Personally I appreciate that they have made the site accessible to me as an English speaker and am fine reading around any grammatical shortcomings.
When I was taking Chinese classes in university, people would sometimes poke fun at the eccentric or badly accented English. I would as them how their Chinese sounds to their native-speaking instructors.
It is strange how the reaction to that was always one of confusion or dismissal.
I bet if we could read their Chinese website, the copy would be perfect.
Some manager who probably doesn't speak much English has tasked a random person on their staff who went to college in the US or UK with writing their English copy, without realizing the difference between "this person can communicate effectively 1:1 in English" and "this person can write formal English like a native speaker".
In other words, a task is being supervised by someone who doesn't understand the task. Just like every other company we deal with. As native (or at least highly fluent) speakers, we just happen to be competent to critique it.
Yes, the Chinese website (http://cn.wrtnode.com/) is perfectly fine. (Chinese is my second language.)
However, I would not immediately characterise the copy as written by a US/UK college grad though - it feels like it is written by someone who learnt English on the mainland.
I don't really know why companies in various parts of East Asia don't hire/outsource to someone who actually is highly fluent in English to write/edit their copy. Sometimes I suspect it is simply due to cost, other times I suspect they just don't realise that their fluency is not quite.. 'international English' level
(No offence to anyone who runs/writes for East Asian company websites.)
For my coworkers based in Taiwan who are somewhat fluent, they mostly don't recognize it, and really can't.
Their limitations are effectively hidden from them. Odd things still come out, but in informal contexts it's not worth correcting, and there's little opportunity for formal critique. (There's also the issue of "face" that complicates matters and drives me insane. It's easier with people who have spent a few years in the US, though.)
If there's no (near-)native speaker around to check, nobody's going to notice until it goes out to the world, and then there are a half billion people ready to jump on it.
If they recognized it, I don't think cost would be a factor. I could review/correct a site like this in an hour (or less). I might spend a day on the mini-manuals that come with some gadgets.
They don't need better translation. They need a cultural liaison. You can speak English at a very high level but without deep cultural involvement, you won't know that "get out of the city" and "get out of town" have very different meanings.
When the peasants are revolting its very different from when the food is revolting!
If I can share a suggestion: the phrase "Born to be proud" comes off as a bit arrogant and doesn't sound natural to a native English speaker. If you're proud of the product, or you're trying to convey the idea that it was created with good intentions, some different wording might get your point across better. Something like "a better open platform" or "born to be open" [even though that also doesn't sound natural either, unless you know what 'open hardware' is].
Here i've cleaned up some of the copy from your sales page:
"WRTnode is a high performance, low power, small, inexpensive development board intended to run OpenWRT OS. It also easily ports open source software based on Linux.
Today, more and more devices are connecting to The Internet of Things. The WRTnode is a small node which can connect to the internet all by itself and perform complex tasks, like detecting a cat running by, or identifying your speech and twittering it, or checking your email and speaking it to you, or learning how your room is laid out and finding garbage to sweep while streaming video to you over the internet.
[..]
Open Source hardware for OpenWrt
[..]
[remove the line "smart machines' heart"]
complete set of high performance I/O
[..]
Local dns uses i.wrtno.de, wrtnode.lan, and openwrt.lan
[..]
default WRTnode ip 192.168.8.1
[..]
WRTnode additional features (source at github.com/WRTnode):"
Made with pride is the most literal translation. I think the intent though is Born to be free however there is no good translation of that given the many meanings of free that even native speakers cannot understand ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre )
It looks good now. Next time I will try your support link instead, but I am glad you saw the comment and got it cleaned up.
In the future it shouldn't be too hard to find someone willing to support and a good open source project with some proof-reading. I may not be the best candidate, but it would be a good way for someone to get started helping the project, and could make a big difference if you are targeting a larger audience.
Thank you very much, It's very kind of you all if there's anyone like chrisBob mentioned who willing to help us with our poor English, pls mail me: noel@wrtnode.com, we could pay for it. :)