And that tactic is working so well now.
We hope translation bring you great experience! It composed of high quality.
Well, yes. When’s the last time you decided not to buy a product, or returned one, because its instructions were poorly translated?
If the document was translated externally, you’d assume they were professionally translated, but would still need checking, if for nothing else than to ensure that things such as product names, or things the external translator (agency) couldn’t know, are correct (department names, consistency with other documents, etc). Even a professionally translated document needs to be checked. A good manager knows this and realizes this is the cost of doing business. For most jobs, however, pro-level quality is not mission-critical - as scr4 noted, when’s the last time anybody decided not to buy a product because the manual was poorly written / translated? Or the opposite - purchased a product because the manual was well-written?
A department marketing products in that many languages usually would have some in-house department or team handling things like that; it’s common for stuff (particularly sensitive internal documents) to be handled in-house and other stuff or excess sent externally. Smaller companies may not have this structure.
And yes - in Japan, it is astonishingly common to have Japanese managers - almost always with little actual translation experience - insist that their knowledge of English is better than the native-English speaking translator. There is one client I used to have, that shall remain nameless and should be jobless, that I refused to work for because the client was an idiot and I do not blindly follow the ‘client is always right’ crede.
This is my experience when people ask me to translate English-Spanish or Spanish-English. I speak both fluently, but, by golly, translation is hard for all of the reasons you mention.
It’s a pretty large, popular company, it would seem: Instant Pot. And given that the basic instructions include a recipe for some Chinese bun that normal people would never make, I suspect that they’re Chinese immigrants to Canada with manufacturing ties in China, which is pretty common. It’s just, well, you’re in Canada. It’s full of native English speakers. I’d bet the French part of the manual is better than the English part, because they probably have real French Canadians doing the work.
The primary market for the product is probably China, not North America or English speakers.
OK, the OP’s pitting is pretty lame, but while we’re here…
What’s worse is eBay sellers who use terms in the title that are not present in the product, and are either deliberately included to increase search hits, or (more likely), are included because the seller has no idea what they mean.
As an example, I was looking for Post-It notes (or the equivalent non-3M product) on eBay, and the first thing I noticed is that they are insanely expensive. I then found a seller who had some really nifty iPhone-themed “sticky notes,” that were very inexpensive. I bought them, and when they arrived from Asia, I was miffed to find that they were just a pad of paper - no stickum at all. So, I complained to the seller, and they refunded my money. I suspect that they really didn’t know what the word “sticky” meant - they included it because other sellers did, too.
I bet you’re one of those types that never read included instructions, aren’t you? 
I got my Robotime diorama kits, and the included instructions’ English is even worse than the website descriptions I quoted above. I’d quote some, but what would be the point? For those who don’t think it’s a big deal, it won’t change your minds.
But yes, I’d still buy more of the kits, because they are good enough quality, and, to quote Patsy, “it’s only a model”. I can figure out a kit from the pictogram instructions, more or less. So they have no incentive to change.
I stopped reading them after I tried to follow these.
One of the secrets to good translation is that it’s an acquired art. One example is that there are things which are specified explicitly in one language but not another. Simply translating from one to the other will make the translation too specific or not specific enough.
Taking Japanese, they have separate words for “older sister” (or brother) and “younger sister.” However in modern settings we don’t particularly care that much about the birth order except for certain topics such as when we were children.
While it’s not jarring, translating from Japanese into English winds up with a superfluous “older” or “younger” which usually can be dropped to make it smoother. However going from English to Japanese does make it sound quite odd.
When giving directions in Japanese, commands are sometimes softened by adding some expressions. For example in a train station, they may have a sign for people to “keep right” or “keep left” but in Japanese, it will include "ここでは” (here). So in Japanese it would be “keep right here.” We don’t need that in English, we know that a sign telling you to keep right only means here where you can see it and that you are not required to keep right forever.
Another example of why translation is difficult:
On the luggage carts at Narita airport, there is a Japanese sign that says: 「カートは十分注意の上ご使用ください。」
The direct translation is “Please use utmost care when using the cart.” Someone who isn’t trained & experienced as a translator would probably present that as the translation. But it’s incorrect, because the average English speaker wouldn’t actually get the intended message.
But fortunately they hired someone who understood the actual intent of the Japanese sign, and put the correct translation. Which is: Use at your own risk.
Another example is that Japanese will typically say what grade of school their kids are in rather than how old the kids are. Before, I heard how some father couldn’t immediately say how old their children were, and the takeaway was that the Japanese fathers weren’t that involved with their kids! Rotten fathers! The truth is that if you ask the fathers what grade his kids are in, then they know that like American parents know how old their children are.
Years ago I saw a black and white movie (in Japanese, it’s “white and black”) where a child is asked what grade he’s in. The English subtitle change the question and answer to his age. Only those who speak both languages would understand that.
I set up the Japanese branch off of a US manufacturer and fought with the US head office for the next 10 years about these sort of things. (Industrial stuff, no one cared about kids’ ages 
)
In that industry, no one in the US cares about the product unit weight. They only care about the shipping weight since the customer needs to pay for shipping separately. In Japan, shipping is included in the price and our customers needed to know the product weight for earthquake safety. The total weights for products on the equipment racks needed to be recorded.
One of the reasons that many Western companies fail in Asia is that they simply don’t make the effort to learn enough about what’s needed. The OP asks how US companies’ translations are, and too much of the time there just isn’t a translation.
Oh I don’t know, it sounds kind of poetic.
But then you have this: http://www.adweek.com/creativity/then-well-grab-bite-404-not-found-15632/
I’ve found myself not wanting to buy from the company again, and I may dock it at least a star in my Amazon review. That doesn’t help them in a crowded marketplace.
I agree with you, but this assertion seems to be surprisingly controversial.
Yeah, I just wonder how limiting it is to a company to be found “amusing”. You have pretty much pigeonholed yourself as competing with others based solely on mass-producing stuff on the cheap and competing with everyone else on price. That’s a tough, low-margin business to be in. If you’re selling HDMI cables, okay. But if you’re making a distinctive-looking pair of nice-sounding $200 Bluetooth headphones, don’t you have any aspiration of becoming a real brand? You’re unlikely to ever be Sony, of course; but don’t you want to try to at least get somewhere in that ballpark?
I mean, I used to work for a company that did phone surveys. Sometimes it was political polls, but mostly it was about consumer products. We’d call and ask endless questions about whether someone would be interested in a new kind of floor wax that had a different kind of dispenser and smelled like apple butter or something (I’m making this up but you get the idea). We’d even invite some of the people who met certain demographic targets to come in and get paid to be in a focus group. If these companies can spend so much researching their customers’ preferences, it makes me think the Asian companies can spend what has to be far less just researching whether their English text will make them sound like laughing stocks or like legitimate enterprises worth taking seriously.
And there’s a collective problem here (although with the tragedy of the commons and all, this is tougher to overcome). I think it has an overall affect of making American consumers smirk at East Asians as a bunch of inarticulate dum-dums–when, as I noted earlier, East Asian IQ actually tends toward the high side. Hard to believe that the same cultures so concerned about “saving face” and so on would want to have this image.
Here is one of my favorite Engrish translations. I challenge anyone to clean this up without looking at the source text in the original language!
Jesus.
I’m sure someone on this board will say that it just costs too much or is too difficult to find a translator (that one definitely needs more than just a proofreader!) and it won’t affect their sales or reputation so it’s just fine as it is.
Whatever it is!
I knew a Thai student working on her master’s degree in translation. She had gone to high school in the US, and was from a wealthy family, wealthy enough to give her the best education. Talking to her, on the phone you would have thought you were talking to a native-speaking white girl. She worked as a professional translator too, but … her translations into English were horrible. There was an enormous disconnect between her spoken and written English.
Does a warning sign in Japanese imply a waiver of liability by the warning-offeror or something? I’m having a hard time seeing how the Japanese original conveys that the risk is on the cart user.
Airport of Nashville; yesterday. I could hear people speaking Spanish every ten or fifteen meters. The signs for “baggage claim” and “ground transportation” are in English, Spanish and Chinese. And I hope that the Chinese is better than the Spanish, because in Spanish we were directed to the “baggage hunting decoy” and to “floor transporthing” (the word used for ‘transportation’ wasn’t Spanish).
In the end it’s a matter of corporate values. I don’t expect the bad Spanish of those signs to affect the amount of Spanish-speaking people traveling to or through Nashville; its only negative effect is leaving people with the impression that whomever decided to print them was a moron.