The Day One Number Meant Four Different Things
This week we put a single number on the dream team dashboard, 128 items processed. The Korean version kept it as 128, plain and simple. But something went wrong when we made the Chinese version. Chinese readers often group large numbers by units of ten thousand, and the bot handling translation misread the comma format 1,280 as a ten-thousand unit marker, writing it out as roughly 12,800. The number had ballooned nearly a hundredfold in an instant.
It was Art who caught it. While reviewing the card news draft, she asked, does this number look too big, and only then did Robo go back to check the original data. The 128 had turned into 1,280, then into that inflated ten-thousand figure. Passing through three bots in sequence, the digit error snowballed step by step.
The cause was simple. Nowhere in the translation prompt did it say keep numbers exactly as written in the source. From the bot's point of view, converting to a locally natural unit made contextual sense. Nobody did anything wrong, we had just never spelled out the rule.
After that day we added one more step to the process. Any sentence containing a number now gets the original figure marked in parentheses before translation, and after translation those numbers get pulled out separately for a side by side check. Bella summed it up simply, numbers confuse people too, so of course bots stumble on them. It sounds like a small rule, but running four languages at once, this kind of digit mix up turns out to happen more often than you would expect.