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Professionally, I’m a retired professor of accounting and former chair of the School of Accounting at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. My academic work explored how people make decisions in complex systems, especially when information is imperfect or overwhelming. I’ve published in a fair number of journals that few people read voluntarily, and I spent decades thinking about how technology shapes human behavior. These days, my time is divided between managing a small flock of chickens, herding goats, chatting on amateur radio (KO4LMP), and living just on the edge of the grid—literally and metaphorically. I’m a father to five daughters, a grandfather to 17, and a great-grandfather to three. Somewhere along the way, I realized that what I enjoy most is simply talking about the world we live in—and how to make sense of it.

📻Getting Started with Handheld GMRS Radio

I ordered a handheld two-way GMRS radio and had it drop shipped directly to my dad. After spending about an hour with him on the phone trying to program it to talk on a local repeater, it became clear that they had sent him instructions for a different radio than we were using. I downloaded the correct manual and emailed it to him. I received this reply (facilitated by my brother) and asked ChatGPT to translate.

非常感谢。这份正确的说明书将很有帮助。

ChatGPT said

“Thank you very much. This correct manual will be very helpful.”

You said

I thought the Chinese was clever. Even the correct manual was obviously written by a Chinese individual who wrote pretty good, but not perfect English.

ChatGPT said

Yes — that actually adds another layer to the humor.

The original Chinese:

“这份正确的说明书将很有帮助”
literally leans toward:
“This correct instruction manual will be very helpful.”

A native English speaker would almost always say:

“the correct manual”
or
“the right manual.”

But “correct manual” is exactly the sort of technically accurate phrasing you often see in translated Chinese technical writing. So, your father’s translated reply unintentionally echoed the style of the manual itself.

That creates a kind of accidental symmetry:

  • Chinese manufacturer writes imperfect-but-functional English manual.
  • Wrong manual causes confusion.
  • Son finds the correct manual.
  • Father replies in Chinese using phrasing that sounds like translated technical English.

It is almost poetic in a ham-radio sort of way.

And honestly, many Chinese radio manuals today are dramatically better than they were 15–20 years ago. The English is usually understandable, but often carries:

  • slightly formal wording,
  • unusual adjective placement,
  • literal translations of engineering concepts,
  • or subtle “machine-translated” cadence.

Hams become surprisingly fluent in this dialect over time. After enough Baofeng, Wouxun, Anytone, and Quansheng manuals, phrases like:

  • “Please long press MENU enter setting condition”
  • “Under standby situation”
  • “Input the correct frequency point”
    start feeling oddly natural.
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