Doing Biz On eBay

I’ve always wondered what the Chinese-script company names on eBay meant, so I fed some into Google Translate (clicky for more dots):

Chinese eBay Company Names
Chinese eBay Company Names

Huh.

As the saying goes, ol’ Deng must be living “… modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him.”

7 thoughts on “Doing Biz On eBay

      1. Incidentally, did you try any alternative machine translation services like Bing or Yandex?

  1. “四海芯舟” is four seas (means worldwide) chip boat.
    “萨拉摩尔” is the homophonic translation of “sellmore” in Chinese.

    1. Your translations certainly make more sense!

      Perhaps the Google translation depends more on sound than literal meaning: “chip boat” becomes “Core Boat” and “sell more” turns into “Salam Moore”.

      IIRC, their translations come from Markov models trained on their huge collection of “known good” Rosetta Stones, so we get weird outcomes where they lack enough good matches.

      Thanks for the background!

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