The Communications Act of 1934 - An "Oh, China.." moment

Work in the mornings, before it’s late enough to do any kind of business on the phone with people in Europe, for the past few weeks has mainly consisted translating brochures from Chinglish into English. Sometimes, this is more challenging than it sounds, like this description of the function of an LED light on the front panel of some new product:

“DL: representatives from the expansion modules to RU or lower-level expansion modules (the lower level in this expansion modules connected expansion modules circumstances) The downlink (UL) the success of communications”

which according to my best guess based on context clues, means to say:

“DL: indicates the successful transmission of the downlink signal from the Main Unit to the expansion module (or RU, in the case that RUs are directly connected to the Main Unit)”

Other times, it’s just funny. For example, I’ve recently been talking to a distributor in Europe who is interested in buying a product called a splitter, and was also interested in the series of mobile phone jammers we produce. My supervisor gave me a brochure to send him, which I looked over before sending it out to find the phrases:

(copied and pasted exactly from a section describing places where you might use a certain one of the jammers)

*Church: Clear the noise of mobile phone and keep the church quiet

*Library: Keep the reading condition

*Court Yard: Keep the awfulness and heavenliness

*Examination Room: Avoid cheat

I mean, I don’t know about you but I’d buy anything to preserve the awfulness of my courtyard.

However, the other day, as I was finishing up the jammer brochure, I came to the last product, which is a hand-held jammer. (A jammer is a device that emits a pulse on the same frequency a cell phone works on, canceling out the signal within a certain range and rendering the phone incapable of sending or receiving any data or calls.) Now, with the hand-held one, the brochure advertised in Chinglish, you can have peace anywhere you want it. Hmmm, I thought to myself. That doesn’t sound very legal. So I started doing a little research.

Well, turns out that in the US and most of Europe it isn’t. In the UK, it’s ok to own them, just not to operate them – and no, I have no idea what the point of that would be – but thank goodness I’m working on Europe, because in the US, according to the Communications Act of 1934 (which has been updated to address this kind of issue), manufacturing, importing, selling, or ADVERTISING any kind of jamming device (i.e. what I’ve been devoting my mornings to for the last week), is punishable by a fine of up to $11,000 or one year in prison. Lovely.