Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Is Random English Used So Much In Japan?
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wastrel
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Oui, c'est vrai. |
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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Although rare, there have been a few Japanese singers that tried their luck a singing at least one original English song before...
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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I very distinctly remember my first time seeing English text in an anime, as a very new anime fan, was the news stations in Tiger & Bunny. My initial thought was to praise Viz for going in and translating/editing the original animated Japanese text. Someone later explained to me that wasn't the case.
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MetalUpa1014
 Posts: 283 Location: USA |
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Currently I'm living in the inaka and even here where there are no foreigners for miles you can still occasionally hear the odd English phrase or smattering of words.
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FLCLGainax
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Back in the '90s when I first saw Project A-ko in its subtitled version, I was surprised the theme songs were sung in English and were not a creation of the dub version.
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Mr. Oshawott
Posts: 6773 |
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I wonder if there's ever been a case of a gaming title in Japan that has been English-subbed...
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roxybudgy
Posts: 129 Location: Western Australia |
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Not unique to Japan either. When I visited Malaysia and Thailand, there were lots of signs and advertising that were either completely in English, or featured mostly English text.
Some of the ads were for new homes or apartment developments, and given how difficult it is for foreigners to purchase/own property in those countries, I doubt foreigners are the target market for those ads. Like others have said, they probably use English because it's cool. |
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Sakura Shinguji
Posts: 190 |
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"For example, when Japanese fans watch End of Evangelion and Komm Süsser Tod starts playing, nobody knows or really cares that much what those lyrics say. It simply sounds like a rollicking English/foreign gospel song that washes over them as part of the larger experience."
Or perhaps (with Mike Toole's recent column in mind here too) a few of them might think they do know the song and the lyrics, but it's confusing them because it's not quite the same as they remember. (Is there someone who hasn't noticed this before? Did I blow your mind?  )
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Pidgeot18
 Posts: 101 |
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You can do the voice track of the North American release of Atelier Iris in Japanese, if that's what you mean. It's worth pointing out that many countries that use non-Latin scripts do provide transliteration into Latin, since the majority of the world can read some language that uses it. You might not know how to pronounce, say, "Pl. Narutowizca", but that's usually sufficient to at least navigate to if you were told that's your stop. If there's actual translation, it'll usually be in English or French because virtually the entire world outside the Americas and Europe was either an English or a French colony (or of another English/French-speaking country) 100 years ago, and thus the elites would have spoken English or French anyways. And in many such countries, there was no unifying language for them other than the colonial language. English is by far the most common secondary language taught (it's not only one of the top languages by L1 speakers, it's also one of the few languages where L2 speakers vastly outnumber L1 speakers). It's quite common for foreign languages to have a certain cachet, that you use for individual word selection whether for slang (e.g., cojones) or to make you sound smarter or more refined (e.g., je ne sais quoi or cachet). |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh, that reminds me--I haven't visited Engrish.com in months.
Well, you DO have a key difference in how Canada has a lot of people whose primary language is French and some of whom don't know English, whereas you don't have a lot of people in Japan, if any, who learned English first and don't know a lick of Japanese. The French language pervaded the rest of Canada due to French Canadians, but there isn't an English Japanese (or American Japanese, or Australian Japanese) population to provide that kind of influence.
I can say that with Thailand, there's been a fascination with the United States by young people there since at least the early 00's. They'll hang out at McDonald's and Taco Bell, wear what they think is trendy in the United States, watch Hollywood movies and Burbank/Glendale television, listen to English-language pop music, and adopt a few random loanwords and phrases. But the educational system regarding English classes is much the same there as in Japan: Kids just treat it as something they must learn to get good test scores, and despite the USA being the cool country where all the cool stuff happens, few dedicate themselves to learning English well enough to communicate with an American. (Most are not even aware there are multiple versions of English--schools in Thailand predominantly teach the Queen's English, and these people get confused when Americans use their own spellings or terms.) |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Not quite the same; the Netherlands has (or at least as far as I can tell) more people actually able to speak English to a competent level. |
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kgw
 Posts: 1060 Location: Spain, EU |
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Well, at least now you know how do we feel when we heard Spanish words in your English. Seriously, a sombrero is just a hat,
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Mhora
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We do this all around the globe. It's pretty normal.
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FLCLGainax
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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It's worth nothing that the URLs of websites tend to use English for their webpages, instead of any sort of romanization(possibly helped along by web languages having extensive vocabularies). This might begin to change now that UTF-8 is allowed in URLs instead of them being limited to ASCII(making the web less secure in one fell swoop), but it's not likely to be quick.
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