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Engrish is a slang term which refers to an English language phrase that
arose through poor translation from another language (usually Japanese), or
sometimes, poor translation of English into another language followed by
good translation back into English. It is usually considered by
English-speakers as a humorous misuse of English.
Engrish (a pun on the lack of distinction between "R" and "L" sounds in
the Japanese language) also refers to the deliberately careless or mistaken
use of English words in advertising, for example, as "exotic" embellishment.
Engrish also refers to normal mispronunciation of English in a funny way.
In spoken Japanese, for example, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes Eric Crapton,
"McDonald's" becomes makudonarudosu. Japanese, having only five vowels, and
few adjacent-consonant sounds, (as well as no distinct "L" sound) tends to
cause mangling in a way particularly humorous for English speakers. Japanese
uses over 600 imported English words in common speech; such as besuboru for
"baseball", hankachi for "handkerchief", fooku (fo-o-ku) for fork, teeburu
(te-e-bu-ru) "table", and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the
distortion, the more it's considered to qualify as being Engrish.
The term Engrish comes from the fact that Japanese and a few other Asian
langages do not have separate sounds for R and L. Japanese has a sound
pronounced with the tongue halfway between an English speaker's L and R, and
native speakers of Japanese often inadvertently reverse L and R sounds when
speaking English; hence English becomes Engrish. See also Non-native
pronunciations of English.
Engrish used to be a frequent occurrence in consumer electronics product
manuals, which might say something like "to make speed up find up out
document", but it is less frequent today. Another source of poor translation
is an unchecked machine-produced translation, such as that from the
Babelfish service or Google Language Tools.
Engrish features prominently in Japanese pop culture, as some young
Japanese people consider the English language cool and trendy. Japanese has
assimilated a great deal of vocabulary from English recently, and many
popular Japanese songs and television themes will feature a disjointed
phrase or two in English among the mostly Japanese lyrics. Japanese
marketing firms both noticed and helped to create this popularity, and
create an enormous array of advertisements, products, and clothing marked
with English phrases that seem highly amusing and/or inexplicably bizarre to
a native English speaker.
Poor Chinese English (or a mixture of Chinese and English) is sometimes
referred to as Chinglish. Correspondingly, some people talk of Spanglish
(Spanish and English), Yinglish, Nuyorican and similar coinings. Such terms
are sometimes considered pejorative, as it implicitly ridicules people whose
native language is not English. In comparison, English speakers who
embarrass themselves trying to speak other languages are sometimes described
as embarazado.
The phrase "all your base are belong to us" from the game Zero Wing is a
well-known example of Engrish. Another example is "going faster is the
system job" written on computer cooling-fans manufactured by a company
called Titan.
Sometimes Engrish is employed deliberately for an amusing or exotic
effect, just as Han Chinese kanji characters or letters of the Cyrillic
alphabet are equivalently used in Western society as a graphical
embellishment. Similarly, in English, umlauts, accents, misspellings, and "o's
with slashes" are added to give an exotic look to otherwise ordinary phrases
like Mley Cr・ and H臠ar the Hrible; see heavy metal umlaut. See also French
phrases used by English speakers for examples of how distortion or
deliberate change of meaning can take place.
Other similar terms
- Chinglish (China)
- Franglais (France, Canada)
- Genglish/Ginglish/Germish (Germany)
- Konglish (South Korea)
- Manglish (Malaysia)
- Pseudo-Anglicism (Germany)
- Spanglish (Spain, Latin America)
- Singlish (Singapore)
- Swinglish (Sweden)
- Taglish (Philippines: Tagalog)
- Vinish (Vietnam)
- Wenglish (Wales)
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