(no subject)

[elwen]

To: Dan Brown

I don't know if I ever had any respect for you to begin with, but if I did, you just lost it.

This is kind of a nice complement to my previous post, I think. One is Japanese people screwing up English, and the other is English people screwing up Japanese. :P

ETA: Y'know, one of the reasons many of my stories drag is because I fear having to research what I'm talking about. The Sailor Moon/Xanth crossover stalled when I couldn't find the names of airports in Florida. I'm dreading the day when, if ever, I have to start talking about the Beijing and London seishi in my Fushigi Yuugi fic. [This is also why I prefer fantasy worlds, where I can just make it all up.]

But Dan Brown has shown me the light. Apparently I can still make it all up! And still get published!

I think they need a Rule 11 for writers.

[Rule 11 says if a lawyer signs something it certifies that he reasonably researched the arguments and they have a reasonable basis.]

Comments

[thierrys.livejournal.com]

Ohh, I thought you meant on the community.. *sheepish*

So which makes you angrier, English-speakers with bad Japanese, or vice-versa?

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Ahh, no, I was unclear. Thanks for pointing that out!

Hm... it's hard to say. I think it really depends on the attitude of the person. The more presumptuous, the more it pisses me off. I find Dan Brown's thing pretty egregious because it's in a published novel, and he so blithely pretends he knows what he's talking about that people would be misled. (I'm similarly bothered by the weird pseudo-Chinese they use in Firefly, but at least they can pretend evolution of the language over time explains the weird pronunciation and the fact that they talk like little kids.)

With Engrish, it's almost so much a part of Japanese culture to try to use English to sound cool that you just kind of sigh and move on. There are some totally gratuitous examples that bug me -- the one that comes to mind is in Saint Beast ~Kouin Jojishi Tenshitan~ they randomly have a narrator do some parts in English, kind of like bookends to the story arc. It's really badly pronounced English, and I don't see why they couldn't have had it in Japanese.

But even that's not as bad... I guess -- and maybe this is pejorative of me -- I see Japanese people as being all shiny-eyed and "English is so cool, let's use it!" and Americans as being more calculating about using elements of Asian culture and then being bad because they don't bother to do enough research.

I don't know. I guess there really is no difference between when a Japanese person chooses an English word as the name of their restaurant to make it sound cool, even though it means something utterly inappropriate, and when an American chooses a Japanese word for the same reasons.

...that was probably a longer answer than you wanted. ^^;;

[thierrys.livejournal.com]

No, long answers are good. It's interesting, like when people who aren't into anime/Japan/whatever will make fun of it if they hear the random English, and then they realize that we do the same thing with French or Spanish.

I agree that the misuse of language is irritating in different ways. The thing about Japanese using other languages for cinematic purposes is that it's so often incorrect that you wonder WHY a person couldn't take two seconds to look it up? Especially television producers who would likely have links to someone who's a native speaker. There is a large number of English/French/German speakers in the world, so not taking the time to double-check is either lazy or arrogant. I think that's why the Dan Brown bit rubbed so many people the wrong way--if we can see it without even checking, what was stopping the publisher or author from finding a person with a basic knowledge of Japanese? Maybe the assumption we're all just "ignorant Americans"? >_<

Well, that's most certainly a longer response than you expected ^^