Reply #14: Well, the Engrish phenomenon is a perfect illustration of the [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

adage, "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

Everyone who has gone to school in Japan since World War II has had at least three years of English, six if they're high school graduates. However, until recently, all English instruction was geared toward reading difficult literature for university entrance exams, not toward communicating with English speakers.

For this reason, Japan is full of people who think they speak English. Not only that--some will even "correct" the English of native English speaking translators (like me) in the mistaken belief that no non-Japanese can ever really understand Japanese.

For example, I once translated an article about a company's struggles as the yen increased in value relative to the dollar. I continually referred to "the appreciation of the yen," which is, in fact, the correct term. However, the client then decided that he wanted to add a few more pages, so he sent the whole thing back to me to translate the new material. It was then that I saw what he had done to my native English prose. For one thing, he had changed "the appreciation of the yen" to "the favor of the yen." :grr: He simply didn't know the word "appreciation," so he looked it up in the dictionary, chose the wrong definition, and decided he liked "favor" better.

A further factor is that Asians see Roman letters as decorative.

To be fair, I've seen some funny Japanese or Chinese on T-shirts worn by Westerners. Once one of my students came to class wearing a shirt that had a paragraph of Japanese written on it. The designer had taken a random slice of text from a fashion magazine and silkscreened it on to the shirt--despite the fact that it started and ended in the middle of a sentence.

Another time, I saw a student (not one of mine) wearing a shirt that said in Chinese, "Experienced women workers wanted."

Americans have been known to mangle French and Spanish, too. About 20 years ago, a new office complex in St. Paul put up billboards in French to solicit tenants. Unfortunately, even I could see that the French was all wrong, and a Haitian student of mine confirmed my guess. Every word had either a grammatical or a spelling error.

Certainly the construction company could have found someone who actually knew French to write their copy, but somebody was obviously over-confident.