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 a kind of humor in English-speaking culture.
More often, Engrish is the deliberately careless misuse of English letters for visual effect. To the intended, non-literate audience they have the appearance of legitimate English characters. It is the equivalent of how han chinese or kanji characters are used in Western society as a graphical embellishment.
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's 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.
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 How to tell the origin of an accent.
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"; and make other similar coinings.
The 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.
In typical examples of Engrish, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes "Eric Crapton", "McDonald's becomes "makudonaruudosu". The more ridiculous and humorous is the mangling, the more likely people are to classify it as Engrish.
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.
Similar Terms
External Links
- Engrish.com - Many examples of Engrish from Japan
- Another Engrish site
- The Babelfish translation service