I’ve never had to transit through Nashville, so I hope that’s a Nashville thing. They’re pretty good at the airports I’ve been to, though. Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, LAX, Kennedy, Chicago, maybe others.
China is a huge place, and still has comparatively few westerners living there - it’s worth watching some of the explanatory videos on this guy’s vlog to see just how big a cultural gulf actually exists.
Many of the manufacturing operations in China have probably never had a native English speaker set foot in them. Of course it’s true that sufficient English is spoken by some people, or at least enough English to get by in transactions-type conversations with tourists and visitors, but that’s not enough English to write a competent instruction manual or product description.
I mean, I know enough Spanish to be able to buy bread and milk, order a meal, ask where is the bathroom, but if you asked me to write a Spanish instruction manual, it would be a pathetic joke - and that’s with a language that uses a similar alphabet to mine.
Absolutely. Most airports either put up signs that make sense or stick to ideographs.
Like this?
Said to be a sign in Nashville Airport. The bottom version is Japanese, different forms of the Chinese characters. I’ve seen this kind of sign in other airports. I wonder if they keep the message simple on purpose to avoid ‘kana’ (which would come in if you add verb endings, prepositions etc) and perhaps make it somewhat accessible to Chinese readers. Although it’s simple in all three languages.
Besides different forms of the characters those aren’t AFAIK the most common expressions for any of those three things in Chinese. But they still might be somewhat decipherable to Chinese-only speakers from the character meanings if recognized. The expressions are the same in Korean, but few Koreans nowadays can readily read Chinese characters yet not recognize common English airport terms.
Those are the signs, yes. My apologies to the Japanese if that’s the third language (I’m really confused by your explanation).
Maybe the Japanese (or Chinese) part is purposefully simple yet correct, but I doubt it given that the Spanish part is not in Spanish. Those expressions have standard forms which wouldn’t have been so difficult to find out. The airport simply couldn’t be arsed.
No freaking kidding. As some of you may know, I work in an immigration law practice. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I have a degree in Spanish and used to be a court interpreter. I may not know all the slang, and I speak with a bit of an accent, but my grammar and spelling are pretty damn good.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers in the Chicago area, but we had a bitch of a time the last time we tried to hire a bilingual paralegal. I got to grade the Spanish writing tests, and I’m sorry, if it takes you an hour to write a three-sentence letter and the result has 25 grammar and spelling mistakes, you are not bilingual.
Sorry. The Japanese write largely in Chinese characters. They also have syllabary, ‘kana’ symbols which denote the sound of particular syllables in their language. Written Japanese is usually easy to distinguish from Chinese because of the kana.
But a short series of nouns in Japanese can be written all in Chinese characters. So in theory Chinese readers could make out such a sign also.
Except for two things. First the particular form of characters used in post WWII Japan is different from the ‘traditional’ set used in Taiwan, by most overseas Chinese and in Korea (to the extent still used). The PRC uses a different set of simplified characters; they differ more from the old forms than the modern Japanese ones. Second, although the meaning of a word/phrase (except foreign words in Chinese) is usually suggested by the meanings of the characters, particular turns of phrase often differ in Modern Chinese v ‘Chinese derived’ Japanese and Korean words (the latter two are often though not always the same).
So for example ‘ticketing’ is written 発券業務, which is the Japanese term. The first character is 發 in traditional form, others the same. So a Chinese speaking traditional character reader would probably figure it out from the character meanings ‘write-ticket-business-service’ (roughly). In PRC simplified it doesn’t look as similar 发劵业务 though fundamentally the same four characters. And if you tell Google to translate it to Chinese traditional it prefers 售票服務 sell-ticket-serve-service, including a different character that can also mean ‘ticket’. The Korean term written in the alphabet as 발권업무 represents the Korean sounds of the four characters 發券業務. Some Korean speakers would know that, then again they could probably understand ‘ticketing’.
This is an interesting one.
That’s the instructions for a Dragon Ball Z toy. If you think that’s bad, try this one that Rin Chupeco recently posted on her Twitter feed. I think it’s some sort of noodle soup that you add an egg to. Maybe.
Things like this, btw, are why the airline industry settled on English as its only language worldwide, and why the airline industry uses something called simplified technical Englishto avoid ambiguity. The idea has spread to a number of industries world-wide. The basic idea is to use a one word to one definition/part of speech correspondence.
Admitting you made a mistake or doing something that implies someone else made a mistake, even within the same organization, is as unpalatable as bribery among the Chinese? Am I getting this right?
If so, how do they do lessons learned? How do they get process-related feedback and QA? If mistakes are made, the only choice is to pretend no mistake was made?
Speaking from my experience in Thailand, the answers are: They don’t. They don’t. And, pretty much.
Is this one of the main reasons Chinese goods tend to be low quality?
I read an etiquette page (for what that’s worth) about the concept of losing face in China and it seemed to be saying that underperforming managers cannot even be told they’re underperforming. So, if someone is performing below an acceptable standard, do employers just keep them on or do those employees keep being told they’re doing well until one day they’re fired?
Is there something different about the Japanese? They’re known for improving the quality of their processes to a very high degree (Six Sigma - Wikipedia) which seems like it would require recognizing mistakes at some point.
I spent five years in China working for an American manufacturer of fairly complex products, and I can affirm that what we build in China is pretty much the same quality as what we build in Europe, North America, and the rest of the world. And in the Chinese market, we have a reputation for being much better than the domestic fare (ironic, because we’re often accused of “sucking” here in our home turf).
“Low quality” is the result of getting exactly what you pay for, or not demanding what you’re paying for. In the former case, an example might be, “build me a pressure sprayer, and make it cheap.” In the latter case, it’s Apple (or Ford) being very demanding and ensuring that the exact specifications are being delivered.
If you design cheap crap, China will deliver cheap crap. And if you don’t supervise your supply chain and demand they meet your specifications, you might get cheap crap.
This is changing. Particularly at Western companies, the people who succeed are the ones that choose to be at Western companies because they value the feedback and the opportunity to improve, and we Westerners are famous amongst the local national employees for not mincing words. In an environment where annual turnover for our types of salaried positions was 10%-15%, we consistently stayed below 10%, and most of that turnover was due to not being invited to stay after a probationary period.
Younger, college educated Chinese are much more open minded than the generations that preceded them.
Here is something not many people know. You can be a university professor of a language and still not be anywhere close to native-speaker level. But local governments or boards directors of companies think “oh hey, Mr. X is a professor of English at Keio university, he can translate this sign/book for us”. So they give the job to him because they know him and trust him to do a good job because he is a professor. The professor invariably fucks it up. The smart ones find a native speaker (like me) and gets us to check it. The foolishly self-confident ones don’t.
Just think about how many “fluent” English speakers you know who couldn’t write a letter in English without making 25 mistakes, though.
I saw this. A lot. Using the Google Translate app (in “live translate” mode) in Japan to decode signage or instructions (which this is an example of).
I can’t really describe the odd unsettled feeling I got as the screen image of the scene (a sign or such) would jitter and flicker in bits of English (only some of which made sense) overwriting the original Japanese. If AR is going to routinely be like this, no thank you.
We wouldn’t hire them, either.
May pre house the seamy side volitation!
Good lord. :smack:
Google translate is simply terrible at translating between Japanese and English.
I’ve read that set of “instructions” many times over the years. I still have no idea what they’re trying to say.