[mdlug] Hard drives

[Mark Kimsal]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:27:20 -0500, "Aaron Kulkis" <akulkis00 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Raymond McLaughlin
> <driveray at ameritech.net> wrote:
>> I never heard of Jupiter brand Hard drives before you pointed this out.
>> A little googling found that they are produced by ExcelStor, apparently
>> a new Chinese manufacturer <http://www.excelstor.com/en/index.asp>:
>>
>>   ExcelStor Technology Ltd is a Hard Disk Drive Company found in the
>>   year of 2001. She manufactures her own hard disk drives in Shenzhen,
>>   China. She owns the state-of-art Clean room, Testing and Production
>>   facilities. The factory is managed by a team of professionals with
>>   at least a decade of disk drive manufacturing experience from USA,
>>   Singapore, Malaysia, etc. The factory is running with an objective
>>   of manufacturing excellence at all level of staff with uncompromising
>>   emphasis on quality performance. The factory has also a dedicated
>>   team of Continuation Engineering expertise who are focusing on
>>   continuous improvement of product performance, reliability and
>>   quality.
>>
>> I wonder if calling the company "she" if purely a translation error, of
>> if they are trying to appeal to the mostly male mind share in the tech
>> market. :)
>>
> 
> Common translation error from over-gendered languages in which
> even inanimate objects are male and female.

That's usually for languages which have prominent gender, like romance 
languages and germanic languages.  Chinese has none, and English has gender 
limited to pronouns (and sometimes boats).  This is a common Chinese 
translation error because the pronouns - in mainland Chinese - "he", "she" 
and "it" are all pronounced the exact same ("ta"), the only difference is in 
the way they are written.  Getting he/she correct is really difficult for 
Chinese speakers because they don't have to think about those types of 
pronoun differences when speaking their own language.  Add to that, the fact 
that *sometimes* we refer to countries, ships, and cars as "she" or "her" 
(i.e. "her maiden voyage", "my homeland's mother tongue"), and you'll often 
hear Chinese people mixing up English he/she in everyday speech.

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