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Engrish refers to the grammatically incorrect variation of English that is often found in Asian countries, but can be found anywhere. While the term may refer to spoken English, it is more often used to describe written English, for which problems are easier to identify and record. Engrish has been found on anything from badly translated signs, menus, and instruction manuals to bizarrely worded advertisements to strange t-shirt slogans. Usage of the terms may range from humorous to the slightly pejorative. Country-specific terms, such as Japlish or Janglish for Japan and Chinglish for China also exist, although these are usually more derogatory. Although there aren't many websites keeping track of the reverse of engrish, Hanzi Smatter (一知半解) is the most well known.

History

The term originates from the fact that Japanese and a few other East Asian languages do not have separate sounds for R and L or B and V. In the case of Japanese, the R sound is pronounced as an alveolar lateral flap (ɺ), articulated with the tongue flapped against the hard palate behind the front teeth, so that it sounds like a Spanish soft R. Because Japanese does not have a separate equivalent for the English L, native Japanese speakers not fluent in English often mispronounce English words with the letter L in them. While the term mocks the accent, it is used mainly without malice in reference to humorous misuses, puns, and double entendres within written English, not difficulties in pronunciation.

Learning Engrish

Although many Japanese people are educated in English, the lack of native English speakers means that the education is poor and that there is little incentive to practice speaking the language outside school.* Because secondary schools in Japan place heavy emphasis on preparing students for university entrance exams, English classes in junior high and high schools focuses more heavily on grammar and vocabulary, which are tested on the entrance exams, to the virtual exclusion of oral communication practice.

Cultural references

Engrish is usually accidental, but sometimes its use is deliberate. Foreign branding, for example, serves the same purpose it does in the West: exotic embellishment. For the same reasons that a Chinese character tattoo seems "exotic" to many in the West, Asians may appreciate English words or gibberish for its aesthetic appeal alone; straight lines, frequent symmetry, and the unembellished curves of latinate letters all appeal to Asian senses of aesthetics and balance.

A rather surprising but actually innocent use of English as a visual device is the use of the word “FUCK” in capital letters, most frequently in Japanese advertising and clothing. The appeal of this particular word is that there are two angular letters on the outside of the word, and two rounded letters on the inside, therefore very balanced.

Engrish is generally considered distinct from wasei-eigo, which refers to English-based coinages that have found common use in Japan but are unknown in English-speaking countries. Wasei-eigo is usually written in katakana whereas Engrish can be determined to be such because it is written in alphabet.

Poor Chinese English (or a mixture of Chinese and English) is sometimes referred to as Chinglish. Whereas "Engrish" is generally not considered a derogative term, on account of it often being intentional, "Chinglish" is much less neutral, implicitly ridiculing Chinese people who do not speak English very well. Conversely, the term "Chinglish" also applies (in a non-derogatory but perhaps self-derisive way) to Western-born Chinese who have lost much of their mother tongue; when they try to converse in Chinese, they are forced to "fill in" words they don't know how to say in Chinese with the English equivalent, the result being Chinglish.

Some idiosyncratic usages of English among a community that is largely bilingual (Spanglish, Yinglish, Franglais) have names with more neutral connotations, and are applied largely to people whose skills in English are more on par with those of the society in general.

Notable examples of Engrish

Engrish in video games

Some video games are particularly noteworthy for poor Japanese-to-English translations, resulting in memorable Engrish phrases. Naturally, as gaming technology progressed and the mainstream appeal of gaming grew, larger budgets became available for the development of games. The hiring of more professional translators and the use of better translation and quality control methods has resulted in the near eradication of the unintentional appearance of Engrish in later games.

Classic examples
The phrase “All your base are belong to us,” from the Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis video game Zero Wing, is easily the most well known example of Engrish in video games; it spawned an Internet phenomenon and has an internationally strong fad fanbase.

The video game Samurai Shodown 4, for instance, used the word “Victoly” instead of “Victory” at a duel's conclusion. SNK is so well known for the poorly translated phrases in many of their games that sometimes video game Engrish is referred to as SNK-glish. Some other well-known examples of this are “To push start only 1 player button”, “Go next”, “Congraturations” and “Entry your name” from Blast Off, “I feel asleep” and “The truck have started to move” from the NES version of Metal Gear, and "A winner is you!" from the NES game Pro Wrestling.

In the credits of Phantasy Star Online for the Sega Dreamcast, a dedication is made “to every hunters of PSO.” In the American version of Path of Radiance, the hero Ike says “Move out for the target area” when instructing allies to move to a certain point, some examples of less-poorly-translated Engrish.

Examples in the Final Fantasy series
The 1991 SNES game Final Fantasy IV (released in America as Final Fantasy 2), contains numerous engrish lines due to poor translation. Perhaps the most well known one is when the wizard Tellah, in a fit of rage against the bard Edward, shouts "you spoony Bard!". Other lines include"The Road to Mt. Hobbs is being blocked by a thick ice", "Wow you noble looking", and "You are Cecil, I've heard of your feat". Some lines in the game also have extremely poorly constructed sentences that run together in a bizarre fashion. When the white wizard Rosa recovers from her illness, she tells the hero Cecil, "I am alright. And I am a White Wizard. I won't bother you".

The 1997 American release of Final Fantasy VII contained several Engrish mistakes. During the first boss battle, a “hint” was translated incorrectly as “Attack when the tail is up!” instead of “Don't attack when the tail is up!”. When Cloud first visits the slums near Aeris's house, she tells him “This guy are sick.” when talking about a man living in a pipe. The first time Cloud visits Kalm town and asks the citizens if they saw a man in a black cape, one person says, “Listen to me! Just now, some guy in a black cloak goes walked east towards that grassy field”. Later, between rounds at the Battle Arena, the computer asks the player if they would like to go on to the next stage. The option to go on was “Off course!” instead of “Of course!”, and the option to quit fighting is “No, way!”. When the Sneak Attack materia was triggered, the in-battle message which appeared said, “* was cought by surprise.” Also, at one point, it is remarked to Elena in a debate, "You are a Turks." The game also contained several mis-romanizations of English words, such as "Knowlespole", instead of north pole. Most of these errors were subsequently corrected in the PC port of the game.

Current examples
Engrish phrases can still be found in some Japanese versions of games today, such as the popular “Shine get!” from the Japanese version of Super Mario Sunshine, which was popular enough to be parodied in the English versions of later Mario games. Fawful of Superstar Saga is loosely considered to be a parody of poor game translations as well as the less infamous “ZELLLLOOO!!! JUZDIE ZELLLOOO!!!” (which is a mistranslation of "Zero") and “THE BADDLE HAZ JUSD BEGUNN!” of Mega Man X6, said by an insane and badly recovered Sigma.

Engrish in popular media

Engrish in its original sense of unintentional mistranslation is periodically found in translated live action Asian film and television and occasionally in translated Japanese anime. However, it is more often used intentionally in English language productions as a parody of the concept, or of the linguistic differences that give rise to Engrish. In some instances, racist overtones, though unintentional, may be apparent.

Examples in animated television and film
The wartime Donald Duck cartoon, Commando Duck, the caricatures of the Japanese Army speak in Engrish, such as “Hello, please,” and later, “Must always be shooting rope in the center of the middle, just like Lone Ranger!”

Japanese anime can also feature examples of Engrish which, over time, become distanced from their original intended meaning. In Dragon Ball, for instance, the character of Bulma (Buruma) was intended to be Bloomers or panties (her father's name is Mr. Briefs, in the sequel Dragon Ball Z, her son would be called Trunks, and later in Dragon Ball GT she would have a daughter named Bra); later, however, there are occasions when her name is clearly spelled "B-U-L-M-A".

Engrish has been featured in several episodes of the American animated series South Park. In episode 801, titled Good Times with Weapons, the main characters "play ninja" accompanied by a ridiculous song, sung in Japanese by Trey Parker, one of the show's creators, that featured the chorus “Let's Fighting Love”. The song is most likely a reference to Engrish found in some J-Pop songs featured in a large number of Japanese anime. The episode Mecha-Steisand features a Japanese TV announcer, who sings the Godzilla theme song in Engrish. The episode featuring “Chinpoko-mon” also employed Japanese characters using Engrish.

The animated comedy Drawn Together features a character named Ling-Ling (a parody of the Pokémon character, Pikachu) who is an Asian of unspecified nationality. Ling-Ling's speech consists mainly of Japanese-sounding gibberish, while his subtitles contain almost exclusively Engrish. A joke directly referencing Engrish occurs in the episode "Super Nanny": when Ling-Ling takes an eye exam, he says "R" for every letter on the eye chart even though every letter on the chart is actually the letter L.

Examples in live action television
In the Monty Python episode, "The Cycling Tour," the main character tells a Chinese man posing as a British Consul that he is on a bicycle tour of Northern Cornwall, to which the "consul" replies, "Ah! Colonworol!" An entire sketch built around the concept is "Erizabeth L," in which a Japanese con artist posing as an Italian film director is unmasked when the English cast of his period drama have trouble understanding his script.

Benny Hill episodes have an Engrish speaking character called Chow Mein; his mangled English phrases baffle his interviewer: “How rubbery, evlybloody's crapping!”

On The Tonight Show, Jay Leno frequently shows poorly translated instructions from Asian products as part of the "Headlines" segment.

On the classic Seinfeld episode "The Chinese Woman", Jerry's girlfriend, who goes by the name Donna Chang despite not actually being Chinese, uses the word "ridicurous" in a conversation.

Examples in live action film
An early example of modern Engrish was seen in the 1983 comedy A Christmas Story, when waiters at a Chinese restaurant attempt to sing "Deck the Halls" to restaurant patrons. Ironically enough, the Chinese language, unlike the Japanese language, has very distinct "l" and "r" pronunciations, suggesting poor understanding of different Asian linguistic terms with the song being mis-interpreted with "r" consonants instead of "l":

Another movie example is the "Supplies/Surprise" gag from the movie UHF.

Still another movie example is the character of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, in the 2005 puppet movie World Police, by the creators of South Park. In the movie, Kim Jong-Il (actually a marionette) always pronounces "L"'s as "R"'s, and even sings a feature song, "I'm So Ronery" (a mispronunciation of "I'm So Lonely").

A significant plot point of the film-noir movie Chinatown involves a Chinese man telling Jack Nicholson's character that something is "Bad for glass."

Other examples

The Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q has a character named Christmas Eve of Japanese descent. She constantly confuses her L's and her R's, becoming incomprehensible at one point while trying to say the word "recyclables" during the song "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist".

Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Honourable John So, is also an exponent of "Engrish". Of Chinese descent, So is often mocked by comedians and the public for his poor pronunciation of the English language.

Engrish can appear in labels, instructions and diagnostic messages in documentation as well as hardware of products manufactured in Asian countries. One example is "Going faster is the system job" written on computer cooling-fans manufactured by a company called Titan. Another example is an error message on the Fujifilm FP363SC film processor, which reads "Urgentry close processing cover." And yet another example is the printing on packages of chopsticks found in many chinese restaurants, which reads "Please to try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and cultual." You get the general idea of the message being conveyed, but it is not really English. It is engrish.

Japlish

Engrish can also refer to the Japanese pronunciation of English loanwords or a Japanese dialect with a number of English loanwords. Because Japanese has only five vowels, few consonant clusters and no distinction between R and L, English loanwords are often pronounced in a manner that sounds unusual and even humorous to English speakers. For example, in spoken Japanese, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes エリック・クラプトン Erikku Kuraputon, Australia becomes オーストラリア Ōsutoraria, and "McDonald's" becomes マクドナルド Makudonarudo, which is often further abbreviated to マクド Makudo or マック Makku. Japanese uses over 600 imported English words in common speech, sometimes in abbreviated form. Examples are ハンカチ hankachi for "handkerchief", フォーク fōku for "fork", テーブル tēburu for "table", プロレス puroresu for "pro wrestling", and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the pronunciation change is, the more likely it is to be considered Engrish. Even fairly logical English loanwords in Japanese will often sound foreign and unintelligible to an English speaker, such as the use of チーズ chīzu for "cheese" when taking a photograph. These pronunciation changes are linguistically systematic and are completely unrelated to the speaker's intelligence.

Engrish was once a frequent occurrence in consumer electronics product manuals, with phrases such as "to make speed up find up out document", but it is less frequent today. Another source of poor translation is unchecked machine translation, such as that from the Babelfish service or Google Language Tools. Engrish is often created by translating a phrase using the Babelfish service or Google Language Tools to translate something into Japanese, then copying and pasting the Japanese text and translating it back into English.

As an example, a translation of a sentence of this article made by such a translation service:

  1. The term Engrish is considered offensive by some. (Original English Sentence)
  2. 言葉Engrish は一部によって攻撃的考慮される。(Translation into Japanese)
  3. Word Engrish attack is considered by part. (Translation from Japanese back to English)

Sometimes the translations are sensible and traceable, but hard to understand or funny at first view:

  1. Knight -> 騎士 -> Horseman
  2. military -> 軍 -> troop
  3. Refrigerator -> 冷却装置 -> Cooling system
  4. to kill -> 殺すため -> in order to kill
  5. to love -> 愛に -> in love
  6. Stochastic analysis -> 推量分析 -> Guess analysis

Pop culture

Engrish features prominently in Japanese pop culture, as some young Japanese people consider the English language to be highly fashionable. Japanese has assimilated a great deal of vocabulary from the English language, and many popular Japanese songs and television themes feature disjointed phrases in English amongst the mostly Japanese lyrics. Japanese marketing firms helped to create this popularity, and have subsequently created an enormous array of advertisements, products, and clothing marked with English phrases that seem highly amusing or inexplicably bizarre to a native English speaker. These new English terms are generally short-lived, as they are used more fashionably than meaningfully. Many times English is just used in advertising or on products as an attempt to look modern and is not actually an attempt to communicate.

In contrast to Engrish, the term Nihonglish is occasionally heard, as well as the variant 英本語Eihongo, a combination of 英語 Eigo, the Japanese word for the English language, and 日本語 Nihongo, the Japanese word for the Japanese language. It refers to the conceptual opposite of Engrish: badly pronounced and ungrammatical Japanese produced by a native English speaker. A typical example is the American English pronunciation of こんにちは konnichiwa; rendered with an English stress pattern and phonetics as // . The term Nihonglish is often found among communities of Japanese language students where Japanese can be used sporadically in English conversation much as English is used among English students in Japan. The use of Nihonglish is usually intentional, and is done with a humorous or sarcastic intent. A heavy English accent is used, indicating supposed unfamiliarity with the rules of Japanese pronunciation. It is also known for being practiced occasionally by some non-Japanese fans of Japanese animation; in such cases it is also sometimes referred to as otakuism or Otaku-Speak.

Chinglish

Main article: Chinglish.

Chinglish, a portmanteau of the words Chinese and English, is a term used to describe poor or 'broken' English employed by native Chinese speakers. Chinglish is usually found in written form. Famous examples include "no q" as a response to "thank you" (often sinicized in Mandarin Chinese as 三Q - san q) and ok lah. (The second example is both Chinglish and Singlish.)

Konglish

Main article: Konglish.

Konglish is the use of English words (or words derived from English words) in a Korean context or a Korean dialect mixed with English loanwords. It also includes the use of words that are perceived to be English, but are in fact not English words. These could be words that have a different meaning in Konglish than they have in English, words that merely look or sound English, or words that are a mixture of Korean and English. Koreans usually use the word exclusively in the latter sense. In South Korea, the term Konglish is used to refer to a variety of English spoken with a Korean accent.

Singlish

Main article: Singlish.
Singlish, a portmanteau of the words Singaporean and English, is the English-based creole spoken colloquially in Singapore. It is very similar to Manglish, spoken in neighbouring Malaysia. As a distinct creole it is arguably not broken English, since it has its own rules. Using English as a base, it draws from a variety of vocabularies and grammar, including the Chinese dialect Hokkien and Malay.

This often makes it difficult for speakers of other English dialects to understand. The main difficulties in understanding are Singlish's unique slang and syntax, which are more pronounced in informal speech.

Engrish grammar

However, even if the Engrish (whether in Japan or another part of East Asia) does not have any actual errors in spelling or grammar, English-speakers can still quickly pick up on it as having been written by a non-English speaker, even if subconsciously. Usually, the telling characteristic in such cases is inappropriately selected words used to translate the Japanese or Chinese. The typical result is a strange mix of more erudite Latin-derived English words (which are often not quite correct themselves) mixed with informal or slang English words or expressions. The photo to the right, for example, contains among its mistakes the highly informal "chuck" instead of a word such as "dispose" which might be more appropriate. Another example, cited by Dave Barry, is a sign in Guangzhou, China, which states: "The Guangzhou municipality has allocated funds for get rid of hidden electrical danger in the building Comprehensively." This Engrish problem has improved vastly in Japan over the decades, and more recently in China as well.

Engrish is occasionally employed deliberately for an amusing or exotic effect, just as Chinese characters or letters of the Greek or Faux Cyrillic are equivalently used in Western society (usually incorrectly) as a graphical embellishment. Similarly, in English, umlauts, accents, Ø, and misspellings are added to give an exotic look to otherwise ordinary phrases like Mötley Crüe and Hägar the Hørrible (see heavy metal umlaut)— or Häagen-Dazs. See also French phrases used by English speakers for examples of distortion or deliberate change of meaning.

The term Engrish has been increasingly used for any occasion when English is misspelled or misused in other countries.

See also

External links

Slang | English pidgin and creole languages | Forms of English | Ethnic slurs | Mixed languages

Engrish | Engrish | Engrish | Engrish | Jenglish | Engrish | Engrish | Engrish

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Engrish".

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