Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Japanese-Engrish

Interestingly there isn't much of it.

Sure there are some occasional places where it is amusing, but it is not as rampant as it was in Korea. Here the funniest thing I saw was an omelette on a menu which described it as using 'enough eggs'. We had a good laugh over that dish. But most of the mistakes you will find are normally on chalkboard-like signs with advertisements or changeable English menus and such. They are typically hand written affairs and easily fixed. For example on a little chalkboard by a sink someone wrote 'You got a me'. A little water took that 'a' right off and fixed it.
Other places where you hope to see awkward English is typically pretty hard to find. Like the store fronts of the names of restaurants. Those are best found in Korea. I kid you not. There was one English academy in my town in Korea named 'Winning English' I always got a good laugh out of that. Especially when the Charlie Sheen 'winning' thing happened.
Other places you may see it are on T-shirts. You won't find it on too many adult t-shirts, though on the ones that you do find are going to be awkward anyways since you know you will almost never see that on a grown person in the U.S. Where you do find the most awkward English, is on the t-shirts of the young-ins. Their shirts are cheap and colorful and something that they wear and don't think twice about, and perhaps the larger contributing factor is that they come from China. Kids are not picky about their clothes and wear them into the ground. Pretty literally. Therefore most parents get whatever is cheap for their daily use. And those just so happen to be from China. Not to say their own clothes are not from China, but they take better care in the selection of their own clothes and will go for brand names and more expensive things and do not have the awkward English problem.
Kids on the other hand...
Sometimes it is not so awkward as it is just wrong. I had one kid who had a bunch of writing artfully arranged on their shirt, and as it seems their new favorite task for me is to read their shirts, I had the pleasure of reading hers...'fununglement' the heck does that mean. Others are amusing like a shirt my friend found and bought displaying GET KRUMP GET KRUMP GET KRUMP and even worse, a good portion are not something you would want your kid to wear. For example, I have a student who walks around school in a black shirt with SKANK written in pink glittery letters on the front. Oh my indeed.

Here are a few good select shirts I found in the mall the other day. I don't know about you guys, but Notable Jabberwocky...
Yep, you're doing it right Japan. hahahaha

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing this funny and interesting post. I have seen some "Engrish" translations produced by translation firms, but I find it fascinating that tee-shirts would be mass produced without someone asking another person of native tongue to proofread the translation.

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