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  • Wrong numbers all the time in so many web novels, why?

In nearly all web novels they get numbers wrong all the time.

I am not talking about calculations and a bad digit after the decimal sign.

I am talking about:
- 30'000'000$ on one page and 30'000$ on the next page.
- They drive for many hours with the car and then they are asked if they really drove all the 2km with a car.

These are just two recent examples I read, but there are really hundreds of them.

Why do these errors exist all the time? Even in books which are translated in really very good English?

Are the originals so bad because the authors just can't do any numbers? This is a crazy theory and I'd like it to be wrong because I think these authors are great people and I'd prefer them to be at least normal with calculations.

Or lays the problem with the translations? Then why exactly? Are Chinese numbers contextual and the translators did not really do something wrong?
Are Chinese numbers just difficult to understand and the translators, who translate the rest nearly perfectly, are not up to the task to translate these numbers?

There must be one reason which is valid for multiple authors/translators/books at once. What is it?

    Quiescent_Rumble Translators are just incompetent most of the time. I had the same thought as you, and i even bothered to check the original chinese texts from Qidian in several WN. I ran it through google translate and it gave the correct numbers every time. I seriously don't understand how translators can fck up something that even machine translation gets right. It is just numbers. Not even calculations or formulas, just simple numbers. It is so basic and rigid that mtl can translate it perfectly fine...

    On the other hand there is also the problem of WN authors not caring enough about details. Such WN turn out to be subpar anyways so i generally don't read them, thus i personally don't encounter that problem as much as the translators fcking up. You could say that authors fcking up numbers doesn't really mean that the author is ignorant. No one is THAT ignorant to fck up simple math in this day and age. I think it just shows the level of care the author gives to his story, and such novels don't turn out well in the end as that same level of care is reflected on the other aspects of the story as well...

        N0xiety Thank you, I did not expect it to be really just the translators not being able to translate numbers.

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