To clarify, as a linguist with relevant experience, I just like to see improvements in translation quality. If there's specific feedback I think I can give, then I would hope that the translator would take it in a constructive and productive way.
N0xiety
The point of the criticism isn't about which word is more accurate. It's about comprehensibility for most English speakers. If the only concern were accuracy, then we'd just use the original raw for complete accuracy.
In any case, translators aren't restricted to mapping items 1 to 1. In fact, in most cases it ends up producing translation English, where each word of an expression is translated in sequence instead of just rephrasing the whole thing (e.g. "he gave him a face-slapping." vs "he humiliated him.")
Something to think about (three sentences with varying nuance in Singlish according to a Quora post):
“This meal is disgusting leh!”
“This meal is disgusting lor”
“This meal is disgusting haiz…”
Would you say that there is no way to rephrase these sentences so they are comprehensible to people who don't understand these terms?
Daoist_Jie
Thanks for your perspective. I also enjoy learning about other cultures through language, but is it fair for a product to expect every reader to exit the text to look up terms?
When a special term has significance, it isn't unusual for an explanation to be given alongside the untranslated term. That situation is a bit different from this one, as 'hais' isn't an especially significant term relevant to the novel.
This case was just unusually inconvenient as the context (frequently isolated as a single word response) lacks information and external lookup is difficult because most results have a different spelling.
Miya
Whether you understand it or not is unrelated to whether something is primarily used regionally. I'm completely open if you have sources that demonstrate 'hais' being used with regular frequency in most other English dialects.
I am well aware that translators aren't perfect. That's the whole point of feedback.