Giugiaro
Member
Hello. It's me again.
I know that the short scale on number naming has been long adopted by Britain since 1974 and, what concerns English speaking countries, the rule "thousand, million, billion, trillion" apply.
Either people like it or not.
What brings me here is the confusion created when translating figures between information of long scale countries and short scale countries. In Portugal we started having that discussion because news agencies literally translate the numbers without converting scales. A lot of US and Brazilian figures are noticed wrongly because of the use of the short scale on those countries, greatly inflating their perceived values.
Case in point, the news that Apple reached its market value of a Billion USD. The information was passed down in Portugal as "Um Bilião de Dólares", making the Portuguese believe Apple is worth 1,000,000,000,000.00 USD (1x10^12 USD) and not 1,000,000,000.00 USD (1x10^9 USD). The same mistake was repeated in Spain.
Obviously, as it seems to be universal, comments on newspaper websites and Facebook pages were the usual stuff.
For Portuguese, there's also a difference in syntax, as the European, African and Asian Portuguese speakers use Bilião and Trilião for 1x10^12 and 1x10^18 respectively, the Brazilian Portuguese speakers use Bilhão and Trilhão for 1x10^9 and 1x10^12 respectively. Despite this, not everyone knows the two graphemes corresponde to two different values and some gramar websites even say wrongly the two terms correspond to the same value. (But depends on where and by whom it is being said!?)
Has this sort of issue also happened on UK news? Any issues that have risen from misinterpreted number values?
I know that the short scale on number naming has been long adopted by Britain since 1974 and, what concerns English speaking countries, the rule "thousand, million, billion, trillion" apply.
Either people like it or not.
What brings me here is the confusion created when translating figures between information of long scale countries and short scale countries. In Portugal we started having that discussion because news agencies literally translate the numbers without converting scales. A lot of US and Brazilian figures are noticed wrongly because of the use of the short scale on those countries, greatly inflating their perceived values.
Case in point, the news that Apple reached its market value of a Billion USD. The information was passed down in Portugal as "Um Bilião de Dólares", making the Portuguese believe Apple is worth 1,000,000,000,000.00 USD (1x10^12 USD) and not 1,000,000,000.00 USD (1x10^9 USD). The same mistake was repeated in Spain.
Obviously, as it seems to be universal, comments on newspaper websites and Facebook pages were the usual stuff.
For Portuguese, there's also a difference in syntax, as the European, African and Asian Portuguese speakers use Bilião and Trilião for 1x10^12 and 1x10^18 respectively, the Brazilian Portuguese speakers use Bilhão and Trilhão for 1x10^9 and 1x10^12 respectively. Despite this, not everyone knows the two graphemes corresponde to two different values and some gramar websites even say wrongly the two terms correspond to the same value. (But depends on where and by whom it is being said!?)
Has this sort of issue also happened on UK news? Any issues that have risen from misinterpreted number values?