As you know, nearly all computer components are manufactured overseas, mainly by companies in China and Taiwan. Even though overall product quality has vastly improved in the past years, there is one area that still needs a lot of improvement: the text present on product boxes and in documentation, many times written in “Engrish,” a form of the English language that only makes sense to whoever wrote it.

The problem is that marketing is often an alien concept for these companies. They don’t get that consumers will be annoyed by boxes or documentation that are poorly written and, in some cases, misleading–and might stop buying the manufacturer’s products.

Examples are easy to find: “Breakage Invalid” (instead of “Void if Broken” on a warranty seal); “As sealed stick was removed, lost or damaged, it shall be out of warranty validity!” (on a power supply label); “Overclocking at 600 W continuously” (on a power supply box–the correct word would be “Overload” since you can only overclock something that has a clock signal); and “World’s First AMD 880G Chipset Motherboard Supports Unlock CPU Core” on a motherboard box.

I’ve spoken with the U.S. offices of some of these manufacturers about this issue, and they were unanimous: The problem is the headquarters in Asia, which thinks that just because the company has someone in the U.S., this person is able to write perfect English. Or the company is too cheap to hire a native speaker to revise the text. Or when the U.S. office points out that some text doesn’t make any sense, headquarters replies “but that is the meaning in Chinese.” Some people just don’t get that translation can’t be done literally.

The best example is when manufacturers decide to have a multilingual manual. To save money, they may use online translators and then the damage is inevitable. The best example is the word “driver” as in “device driver”. Some online translators convert “device driver” into the equivalent of “device chauffeur” in other languages, making the product manual a comedy piece.

Another example that I saw yesterday was with the term “CPU package” (i.e. the CPU’s physical format). A manufacturer translated “package” as the equivalent of “box,” making the text nonsensical, because it now referred to the CPU box and not the CPU socket type.

This is not to say that a the product manual has any use even if it is flawlessly written. Some manuals contain no useful information whatsoever. Just try to find any information about an obscure motherboard setup (a.k.a. “BIOS”) option, and the manual will probably simply repeat the name of the option. Here is the explanation that a motherboard manual gives for the option “VDroop Control”: “This item is used to select the VDroop control mode”. Please tell me something I don’t know.

(Gabriel Torres is the editor-in-chief of Hardware Secrets, a US-based website about PC hardware.)