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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, there was a time when Google translated "Japan" in Japanese to "Korea" in Korean... because documents scraped from the web would say "Japan and Korea" in Japanese and "Korea and Japan" in Korean.

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Common with international treaties. The trade agreement known as USMCA in the USA is known as CUSMA in Canada and T-MEC (Treaty between Mexico, USA, and Canada) in Mexico. Countries almost always put themselves first.

To be fair, if they don't, no one else will!

https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1.14?lang=bi

"He used to say, if I am not for myself, who will be for me?"

And NATO is also OTAN, because France insisted on having a French translation of the treaty to be treated equally with English version.

Btw NATO and OTAN being anagrams is a coincidence

is backwards even

Also related and because of the French: UTC. It was chosen as a concession between the logical English CUT or French TUC. Also the two are backwards, which I think is not really a coincidence due to word ordering rules in French.

> Btw NATO and OTAN being anagrams is a coincidence

Not really, many initialisms are mirrors between French and English because their very similar languages in these contexts (same names and same etymology for nouns and adjectives means same letters) and grammatical rules are the opposite of each other (reversed letter order). Eg UN and NU, EU and UE, EEC and CEE, CCP and PCC…

And then, when you can't even agree on dual initialisms, you get UTC.

I really like this one, it basically learned that "first country" is "this country", and "second country" is the "other country".

I've seen something similar, briefly and ages ago now, with it doing the equivalent of* en:"I speak English" -> fr:"Je parle français".

* It might not have been French, I remember the effect not the detail

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