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Comment by PavlikPaja | Hacker News Reader

Or they could publish the actual term used so that anybody could check, but they didn't. But they use Beijing written in the characters, as if it was the important part.

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They wrote Beijing as 北京市 because that's how it showed up in the database. But they also wrote "BreedReady" because that's how that key also showed up in the database; all the DB keys are English, apparently (https://twitter.com/0xDUDE/status/1104482014202351616). I'd assume it's designed around good ol' fashion fear that not all languages accessing the DB are Unicode-capable for labels and identifiers.

NextWeb's reporting on the Twitter thread suggests that the phrase may be a Chinese attempt to translate to English a Chinese word meaning "woman of child-bearing age" [https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/03/11/1-8m-chinese-women-de...], but we don't actually know because we have no primary source on what character was translated as "BreedReady."

"Mistranslation" to me implies something that was originally written in another language. Not somebody speaking poor English.

The actual term in the database is "BreedReady". The article translated "北京市" into Beijing because readers probably speak English and not Chinese.

"Mistranslation" to me implies something that was originally written in another language.

Since the database is Chinese, it's fair to assume that the people who came up with the keys are native Chinese speakers, and thus would have translated the concept they wanted to express into English to get ASCII-only keys, and came up with "BreedReady".

It's not just speculation, the fact is the database is Chinese and the key is "BreedReady". I don't find it that difficult to understand how it could have ended up like that.

Oh. No you don't translate when you speak another language, you may be worse at speaking it than your native one, but speaking any language works the same way, you speak or write directly and don't translate.

It still could be a translation to keep the keys in English though.

Let’s say there was a database you were setting up and it only accepted Chinese keys. You have the keys in you head type the into a language to Chinese translator and you use that. You likely aren’t going to check for correctness, whether it’s polite, slang, or jargon. You just use whatever came up. That’s the “mistranslation”.

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