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Comment by Sniffnoy | Hacker News Reader

> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context?

Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?

My point is this site doesn't provide any context. It's very weird to say "mega should be translated to 兆/百萬/超級/巨型" without specifying the context first. A Reddit "megathread" is definitely not a 百萬討論串.

*Edit: my word choice was wrong in the parent comment. I meant to say "every context", not "any context".

Literal translations often have that problem, and even human translators need context.

The initial comment looked like there wasn't any context, which means "mega" could just as easily mean «SI million prefix» as «huge».

In written English, the word "minute" in isolation and without context may be the noun for the time period of 60 seconds, or it may be the adjective «very small».

And even if it is representing a moment of time, it may not be representing exactly sixty seconds. It could in fact be an idiom representing an indeterminate longer interval:

This particular usage has been around, colloquially, for a minute.

Ah, I see.

Slightly besides your point, but there's a disagreement on Chinese SI prefixes for mega and tera. Most users might use Traditional Chinese in a Taiwan context in which 百萬 is correct, but it's possible for a Macau to use TCN and expect mega to translate to 兆. This is why Chinese Wikipedia has more specific settings than just Simplified vs Traditional. It doesn't surprise me to see Google Translate struggle with this term.

In any case, Bing and DeepL both agree with Google on translating it to 巨型 (giant).

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