Engrish Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
in the year 2000]]Engrish is a slang term which refers to an English language phrase that arose through poor translation from another language (usually Japanese), or sometimes, to poor translation of English into another language followed by good translation back into English. (The Japanese-specific terms Japlish and Janglish also exist, although they are much less common and typically considered more derogatory.) Engrish is usually considered by English-speakers to be a humorous misuse of English. Engrish also refers to the deliberately careless or mistaken use of English words in advertising, for example, as "exotic" embellishment. It 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.
The term Engrish is a pun on Japanese and a few other East Asian languages that do not have separate sounds for R and L. In the case of Japanese, the R sound is pronounced with the tongue touching the hard palate behind the front teeth, so that it sounds halfway between an English speaker's L and R. Because Japanese does not have an separate equivalent for the English L, native speakers of Japanese sometimes confuse the two letters when they spell English words. Thus, some of them misspell "English" as "Engrish".
in 2003)]]Engrish can also refer to the Japanese pronunciation of English loanwords. In spoken Japanese, for example, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes Erikku kuraputon (eh rik koo koo rah poo ton), "McDonald's" becomes Makudonarudo (mah koo doh nah roo doh). Because Japanese has only five vowels, few consonant clusters and no distinct "L" sound, English loanwords are often pronounced in a manner that sounds unusual and sometimes even humorous to English speakers. Japanese uses over 600 imported English words in common speech; such as bēsubōru for "baseball", hankachi for "handkerchief", fōku (fo-o-ku) for fork, tēburu (te-e-bu-ru) "table", puroresu (poo roh reh soo) for "pro wrestling", and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the distortion, the more it's considered to qualify as being Engrish.
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. This term is 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.
Alternately, some idiosyncratic usages of English among a community that is largely bilingual (Spanglish, Yinglish) 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.
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 Chinese characters or letters of the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets are equivalently used in Western society (usually incorrectly) 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 Mötley Crüe and Hägar the Hørrible (see heavy metal umlaut)— or Häagen-Dazs;. See also French phrases used by English speakers for examples of how distortion or deliberate change of meaning can take place.
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