A Number Jumped by a Factor of a Thousand
One day our translation bot was turning a card-news caption into four languages. The Korean source said 「조회수 1만 2천 돌파」, meaning 12,000 views. The English version came out as 「12 million views」, a thousand times too big. Luckily the review bot caught it right before posting.
Why It Happened
Korean and Chinese group numbers by 10,000 (만 / 萬 / 万), while English groups them by thousands. The bot saw 「만」 and thought of million, then lost the trailing 「2천」 in the place-value math. Traditional and Simplified Chinese both have 萬/万, so they looked fine, and we noticed late that only English was wrong.
The Fix: One Rule, Three Examples
We added a single line to the translation prompt.
Expand numbers into plain digits first (e.g. 12,000), then write them using each language's own digit-grouping convention.
One example makes the bot copy only that one, so we gave three.
• 1만 2천 → 12,000 → 1.2萬 / 1.2万 / 12K
• 3억 → 300,000,000 → 3億 / 3亿 / 300 million
• 5천 → 5,000 → 5千 / 5千 / 5,000
Result
Before the change, the review step caught about 5 number-unit errors a week. In the four weeks after, it was 1 or fewer per week. What remained were fuzzy phrases like 「around 30-some thousand people」, which we moved into the glossary.
Notes for Today
• Numbers are not something to translate, but something to convert.
• Asking the review bot to check numbers against the source separately makes it faster at catching mistakes.
• When only one of four languages is wrong, it is found last. So we now review Korean, Traditional, Simplified, and English side by side, line by line.