Flight attendant's interpretative translation

I'm now once again back in the States again. My last flight, from Tokyo to New York, was a flight bound for Sao Paolo via New York, so all announcements were in Japanese, English, Portuguese, and Chinese.

While we were still in Tokyo, there was a bit of a delay after we boarded. One of the Japanese flight attendants came on and announced, in Japanese, that we were waiting for one of the passengers who had checked in but not boarded, and at the same time they were seeking to remove that passenger's luggage just in case that person didn't make it. There was a fair amount of detail in the announcement. This largely matched what was said in English as well, although there was less detail in English.

When we got to the Portuguese announcement, the flight attendant said what was going on in a curt, single sentence, saying the delays were based on "technical difficulties".

I happened to be sitting next to a Japanese-Brazilian, who noted that that's thanks to a cultural difference between the two. Whereas the Japanese will give you lots of detail about things like that, in Brazil you'll be much more likely to just get enough to keep you appeased. So the difference in "translation" here stands as one of many examples of how the culture of the language you're speaking might manifest itself in speech—or in a lack thereof.

Native speakers using foreign languages in their native tongue

Although the title of this post may sound oxymoronic, bear with me.

One of the Japanese podcasts that I listen to is 日本経済新聞＜総合版＞ (Nihon Keizai Shinbun Sougouban), which focuses on economic issues in Japanese and is of course aimed at native speakers. However, after commercials, an American announcer pops in and says, "The news continues on Radio Nikkei." In English. For those of you who've spent any time in Japan, that's hardly surprising, but could you imagine the parallel in the States? If they threw the same thing into an English podcast in, say, Spanish, I'd expect that most people would have no idea what's being said and that's why it rarely, if ever, happens in the States.

I'm not convinced that everyone in Japan would know what's being said in this case, although I might guess that the subscribers to this podcast are probably a bit above average. Still, everyone in Japan has studied English; it's required in school. So, in theory, they should be able to understand it.

So here's an interesting question. If a foreign language becomes so well understood among speakers of a given language that they throw words, phrases, and even entire sentences from that foreign language into the dialogue when using their native language, has that foreign language actually become part of their own language? Think about it another way; if someone comes to Japan from, say, China, would they need to understand English to the same level as the Japanese do in order to understand what's going on in Japanese? They very well might. Indeed, the Chinese are a very apt example, because one of their trouble points in Japanese are words written in katakana, which are primarily from English and don't share the Chinese character roots that many Japanese words do.

Link: Nikkei Shinbun Podcasts (in Japanese)

Language-learning linkwrap 2/17/09

On the Spot - Vincent of Street-Smart Language Learning: Yours truly was interviewed as part of Aspiring Polyglot's "On the Spot" interview series with language learners.

Sound patterns boost language learning - study: What would otherwise seem to be useless gibberish actually helps you learn a language.

开心宝贝_欢语 (in Chinese): If you're looking for music and stories for your kids in Chinese, this is the place to go, complete with links to lots of MP3s.

Take an eduFire Classe for Charity: While this isn't exactly a language-learning effort seeking to benefit the public good (see my earlier post Pro bono language teaching), it is education for the public good.

Different language learning methods serve various needs: Does RosettaStone have the best PR people ever, or is it just me? In an article noting how great immersion is, Rosetta Stone gets a nice blurb but no one notes how far it is from immersion. And don't even get me started on what Mark Frobose, author and founder of Macmillan Audio's foreign language audio line, says: audio CDs or downloads are "the single best way to learn a language". Seriously? So next time you have a choice between immersing yourself in a foreign country and listening to some CDs, go with the CDs! Riiiight.

Early Launch for Language: Money quote: "Children learn inductively, by example and by interacting with the environment around them, and adults tend to learn analytically and deductively." They treat this as a conclusion, but it's really just an observation. Ponder.

Learn how not to trip over foreign tongues: An article listing out numerous language-learning methods. Your mileage may vary.

Trouble switching between langauges

My Japanese father-in-law is studying Chinese. He's a major Sinophile, and I'm pretty sure that when he retires we'll be able to find him wandering around some obscure places in China. He's probably pretty happy that his daughter and son-in-law speak Chinese, and that our kids are effectively being raised trilingually, with Chinese one of the three.

I'm now back in Japan after a two-week stint in China, and I've come back with a suitcase full of Chinese children's books for the kids. When my father-in-law heard this, he wanted to see them, and he immediately grabbed one and started going through it, asking me questions about what they were saying.

He was asking questions mostly in Japanese but with some of his Chinese thrown in there. I found that, if he used Chinese, in replying to him I'd slip right into Chinese, even though I knew I should be using Japanese for him to understand. He might say something like 这是什么？ ("What is this?"), and, knowing full well that if I just broke out in Chinese to explain it he probably wouldn't understand, my first reaction was nevertheless still to start off with Chinese. It was as if by hearing the Chinese my mind had switched into Chinese mode and I had to think consciously to switch it to Japanese.

Read more...I found I was having particular trouble when I had to explain a Chinese phrase in the midst of Japanese. One book he looked at is called 丹利的菜园 ("Tanley's Vegetable Garden"). (Tanley is my best guess as to what the name is supposed to be in English.) While Japanese have an edge in understanding words made of Chinese characters based on meaning, such as 菜园 ("vegetable garden"), phonetic words, such as 丹利 (Tanley), don't mean very much to them. So he asked me what that was. To answer him, I said, "I think the rabbit's name is Tanley," using the Chinese word for Tanley: ウサギの名前は丹利だと思う. To say that, I had to be conscious of what I was saying in order to avoid continuing on in Chinese.

More broadly speaking, being in China for two weeks seems to have put me in Chinese mode. When I got back to Japan on Sunday, I found myself responding with hèi 嘿, when someone called me, which would roughly be the equivalent of "Yeah?" in English. The Japanese equivalent would be hai, but Chinese was just jumping out of my mouth.

One of my most interesting examples of this sort of issue occurred when I just returned to the States from Brazil. In Brazil, I wasn't using anything but Portuguese, so I was completely converted over to Portuguese mode. It was maybe the first or second day I had been back. My mom was pulling something out of the dryer and asked me a question about the clothes. I responded to her, and she laughed awkwardly. The problem was that there was nothing funny about what I said—it was just some mundane comment about the clothes—but when I thought back to what had just came out of my mouth, I realized it was Portuguese. The thing that made this so interesting was that I didn't even realize that I had used Portuguese until her response made me replay it in my head.

So, I'm curious... have any of you had anything like this happen to you before? If so, drop a line in the comments.

Speaking in Hong Kong and Shanghai

I'm sitting in the airport right now on my way back to Beijing from Hong Kong. One thing I find to be quite interesting about Hong Kong is that, when I'm here, I can always relate to Mainlanders who come here and can't communicate with people. Today I spoke with two Mainlanders who speak English. We could relate to each other very well as we spoke about how taxi drivers here understand neither English or Mandarin, so we're left writing out characters for them to figure out what we mean.

I'm not often in a place where I'm surrounded by a language I can't understand, but when I am I get an overwhelming urge to learn it. Yesterday I was in Shanghai and got to hear lots of Shanghainese around me, which made me wish I knew more. I can pick out some things in both Cantonese and Shanghainese, but I'm certainly not at a point of having any meaningful communication in either.

But I can say that if somewhere down the line I find myself in either of those cities for a longer stint, which, I would say, is not entirely unlikely, I'm definitely going to squander some of my free time in an effort to learn the local tongue.

Darlie Toothpaste: Lacking in the PC department

There is a brand of toothpaste in China called Hēirén Yágāo (黑人牙膏), or literally Blackman Toothpaste. The particular man that they chose to serve as the smiling icon of the company is wearing a tuxedo and a top hat, but is only vaguely black. I couldn't help but feel like there was something decidedly un-PC about Blackman Toothpaste. However, they don't translate the name literally into English; the name they use in English is Darlie Toothpaste, which on the surface seems innocent enough, but I was always a little suspicious that that originates from "Darkie".

Well, about ten seconds of Googling just resolved all my doubt.

Read more...According to this Wikipedia article, it turns out my suspicions were exactly right. The toothpaste was first created by a Taiwanese company and it was called Darkie Toothpaste, complete with a caricatured black man's image that seems to be exaggerating the contrast between his skin and his teeth. Wikipedia notes no uproar about it, but in 1985 Colgate-Palmolive bought the company that owned the brand and obviously couldn't have that among their new subsidiaries' products. The solution? First they changed "Darkie" to "Darlie" and later they changed caricature for a more dignified, only vaguely black image.

I'm still not convinced it's made the full jump to unoffensive. Let's say you take the most unoffensive literal translation: African Toothpaste. What the heck is that? The only way it even makes any sense is if you're contrasting skin color with how white the teeth are: "You're teeth will look as white as a black man's teeth!" Uh, yeah. How about Asian bananas? "Our bananas are fresh and always yellow like an Asian!" Or Native-American apples? "Red as a Native American!" And, in addition, if I saw "Darlie" and thought "Darkie", isn't that something that would occur to other English speakers?

And that, perhaps, is the rub. The branding isn't offensive in a Chinese context, while in an English context it is. Not being considered offensive in the Chinese context, however, is certainly not to say that it shouldn't be considered offensive. However, offensiveness certainly varies form language to language, and this is just one of many examples. (Another that comes to mind is that in many places people will freely tell you that you're fat, where in English that would be really offensive. China is also one of those places.)

Chinese wordplay

I came across an interesting play on words earlier this week in Beijing.

不怕辣。(Bù pà là.)
辣不怕。(Là bù pà.)
怕不辣。(Pà bù là.)

Read more...Roughly translated, these mean:

They don't mind spicy food.
Spicy food? No problem!
They're worried that the food's not spicy.

They're used to describe three groups of people, with each liking spicy food more than the last. Opinions differ as to who prefers spicy food more than the other, but the order is generally Guizhou, Sichuan, and Hunan in order from least to most spicy.

You'll notice that the Chinese uses only three characters, while an English translation that attempts to get the nuances uses a heckuva lot more words. Here's a stunted literal translation:

Not afraid of spiciness.
Spiciness, not afraid!
Afraid it's not spicy.

The three words used are: 不 bù, which means "not"; 怕 pà, a versatile word which literally means "to fear" but is more generally used with 不 bù to say that you don't mind something, often with a flavor of food; and 辣 là, which means "spicy" but in this context is referring to spicy food. The first sentence is just the standard, "They don't mind spicy food." The next sentence ups the ante by putting spicy first, which has the effect of emphasizing the sentence and making it stronger than the first. The third rearranges the words to produce the opposite effect; rather than just not minding spicy food, these people mind when their food isn't spicy.

Any one got any other good examples of things like this in any other languages?

Link: 不怕辣、辣不怕、怕不辣 (in Japanese)