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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

One of the posts contains a screenshot of a vendor's company name and address.

The company name (and words in th address) may look really long and suspicious, but it's just because it's transliterated from Chinese.

OP says these are all 'shell companies', but AFAIK it's more onerous and costly to register and maintain a company in China, than in many states in the US.

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This is pretty much it. People always say it's random mess or fake, but "youxian gongsi" is literally "limited company" and based on Shenzhen. I do a lot of hardware ordering and speak none of the language and picked this up over time.

Chinese company names are generally [location] [selected name] [what they do], like Baidu is Beijing + Baidu + Netcom Science Technology.

The transliteration in the tweet: "shenzhenshizhengshunzidianziyouxiangongsi"

Shenzhen-shi (city), Dianzi (electronics), youxian (limited), gongsi (company)

"wu long da sha b dong" seems like it's Five Dragons Building (https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.... ;some kind of office park?), Building B, and a suite number. The first line is something like "Longhuan 1st Road, Jinglong Community, Longhua Street, Longhua District".

It just looks like a mess because people are not used to it, and in chinese writing you don't separate the characters - it's "有限公司" for limited company, not "有限公司"

Same goes for brand names that are completely unpronounceable in English and the fondness for ALLCAPS. Of course people accustomed to a completely unrelated language and writing system are likely to come up with transliterated or synthetic brandnames or acronyms that seem bizarre to English speakers. Buyers make one-time-only purchases based on search result order, price and star ratings, so localising brandname to the market is well down the list of priorities below keyword stuffing and trimming the Alibaba images. Names which look as bizarre in ASCII as Huawei and Xiaomi have actually succeeded in becoming brands in the West anyway.

(Your comment should probably be the top comment for the thread)

Funnily enough some of them looked like Ikea product names

I'm eagerly waiting for an option in Safari to translate text automatically, without having to click every time.

There was one that conceivably could have been a bad OCR attempt to read Chinese characters using a Latin alphabet which is weird, but some of them do also look like bad/non-standard Romanisation attempts (with an odd lack of spaces etc.). Odd because I'd think technology to accurately generate standard (pinyin) romanisation must be reasonably good by now.

The lack of spaces is somewhat normal if you assume that chinese doesn't use spaces when writing, like a name is just the glyphs combined together in one word, while in English normally there is a space between F+L.

The point of Romanisation is to make it possible to at least mentally turn it into "sounds" for those familiar with Latin alphabets, who (except German speakers) generally expect to see spaces between words too. Japanese writing doesn't use spaces either but all the standard Romaji transliterations do make use of spaces.

I was talking about the company name, but perhaps you were talking about the brand name?

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