07.30.06
Hijoushiki na Engrish
With all the gaming-related magazines out there, I must admit I’m not in the habit of reading them much. Yesterday, because getting buffetted around by herds of stampeding people can get tiresome (at Victoria), I bought gamestm. Like Edge, it has a little ‘report’ via a Japanese correspondent, called ‘Kongetsu’ (p24, issue 46). The word itself is starred, but no explanations can be found in the two pages. For those of you curious enough, it means ‘this month’.
Now this is where my grievances lie. ‘Teach Yourself Japanese: Lesson 46′ proclaims a top right hand corner box. How lovely… except the Japanese and its apparent meaning in English is a bit too garbled… as if Mr Rogers (author of this article) had asked a non-English speaking Japanese person to say the gist of it in Japanese. It’s misleading to say the least, for people really trying to learn Japanese. (The word ‘hijoushiki’ will appear a lot, so for your info, it roughly means ‘lack of common sense’.)
For example then, ‘Hijoushiki de, reigi shirazu no otoko wa mou iyada’ does not mean ‘I’ve not the patience to deal with a mannerless man lacking in common sense’. If I translate the Japanese into English, it’ll come out as ‘I don’t like men who don’t have common sense or have manners’, and if I translate the English into Japanese, it should come out as ‘Hijoushiki de reigi shirazu no otoko hodo atsukainikui mono ha nai’. Oh, and don’t forget, ‘mou iyada’ isn’t exactly a phrase you will use unless you’re being very informal amongst friends or you’re still at school.
‘Ima no hijoushiki na hito ga oosugiru’ just doesn’t make sense (second one down in the aforementioned box). Apparently, it translates to ‘There are too many people, these days, lacking in common sense’… in which case, it ought to have been written ‘Ima ha(pronounce wa) hijoushiki na hito ga oosugiru’. And that sentence would only make sense as part of a conversation… or you’d be considered rude.
‘Shokudou no tsukue no ue ni aruiteta hijoushiki wo mikaketa’ isn’t ‘I saw some person lacking in common sense walking along the top of the cafeteria tables’. That’s just bad translation either way – if the English is to be assumed correct, it ought to be ‘Shokudou no teburu no ue wo aruita hijoushiki wo mita’. ‘tsukue’ is ‘desk’ or an old fashioned way of saying ‘table’, so if you really wanted to say table, you’d probably have said ‘teburu’. ‘aruiteta’ isn’t strictly good Japanese – ‘aruiteita’ is a correct version of it, though ‘aruiteta’ is, again, an informal pronounciation that is rife amongst those who don’t mind mangling their language.
‘Koshuu no menzen no me no mae ni denwa ni deru koto wa hijoushiki nanode gaman shita’ = ‘Though I knew it was not at all common-sensical to answer my cellular phone in a public place, I endured’…??? What the hell? It actually took me a few mins to decipher both. The Japanese one should say ‘Koushuu no menzen de denwa ni deru koto wa hijoushiki nanode gaman shita’, which would in turn translate to ‘Because it is rude to answer a phone in public, I did not’. Simple now, huh?
‘Kiraina taipu: hijoushiki na otoko’ is probably right – ‘My most-hated personality type: men lacking in common sense’, though unless you were a real hard-core feminist, you’d probably end up saying ‘hito’ instead of ‘otoko’, which would just mean ‘person’.
So I’ve just ripped to shreds the ‘lesson’. Apologies to people who actually like that column, but think for a sec. It’s true that Japanese isn’t the friendliest of languages to learn, seeing some words are context-sensitive, the pronounciations differ according to region, and our grammar’s all over the place. On top of that, there are subtle nuances that cannot be translated by someone who’s been in Japan only a few years, even with fluency. It’s a repeat of the ‘All your base are belong to us’ situation, and this time, the Engrish are doing it to the Japanese.
PS Another cultural thing I suppose, but that entire article, barely made sense. If the author wanted to convey how weird the Japanese can be, I think he succeeded, but wouldn’t it have been better all round if the author could highlight how such ‘brain training’ games are very cultural? ‘Shikakui atama wo maruku suru’-type puzzles/problems are slotted in between adverts on trains (literally, ‘making your square head go round’), in true crammer school styles. So such games become instantly popular… and besides, we’re a race of perfectionists and most of us are competitive to a fault, so it’s not that ‘weird and wacky’, really.
