A friend of mine from a cycling forum, who’s opinion I greatly respect, recently removed a reference on the forums to the website Engrish.com.
I wondered why she had taken such action and she replied, ” …. because it makes fun of how asians talk and/or sometimes mess up words when converting to english. If you go into the link and start digging around the website, you see all that crap around there.”
I’d never even considered that the site may be offensive to some people. The last thing I want to do is belittle anyone, especially on grounds of race.
I’ve had a link to the site on my blog for months and I find the misused English very funny at times. I have always thought that the funny part is the mistranslation itself and I have never even considered that it is making fun of the people involved. I have laughed just as hard when I have heard how hopelessly some English speaking people have done when trying to get their message across to non-English speakers. I love language and I think it’s use and misuse can be a great subject for humour.
What do you think? Is the site poking fun at a particular segment of our worldwide community? I know the person from the forums well enough to know that she wouldn’t be offended by such things without good cause. Do you feel she’s being oversensitive or have I missed seeing something that could be offending others?
Posted by Rodney Olsen
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Hi Rod. I actually only followed your link last week and must admit I found the site very funny. I enjoyed it for the wonderful mis-combination of words. (One of my favourites, not on this site, was one of the care instructions for a bum bag “Do not sheep in water”) I don’t see it as insulting to those who do the mis-interpretation and would expect they would laugh just as hard if they had the mis-interpreted meaning explained to them. Well at least I would laugh at myself in the reverse situation. Maybe with cultural differences it could be seen as insulting, I don’t know enough of Japanese culture to comment on this.
Chalk it up to leftist hypersensitivity…
To most of these folks, the only thing left to make fun of with impunity are conservatives and Christians, especially when they are both.
Of course, I could be wrong…
… but I doubt it.
yes – we need to laugh more than we need to be pc!
Rodney, I used to laugh all the time when I lived in Asia and heard mispronunciations. I was laughing at the silliness of the phrases that came out, not at my dear hosts, and never out loud in front of them.
We all do the same thing with our children when they’re growing up, do we not? We still use some of the verbal mistakes Lizzy would make:
breftix – breakfast
rodedo – rodeo
carpatch – ketchup
dokey dokey – okey dokey
pacific – specific
pasketti – spaghetti
grost – gross
“you want a piece of meat!?” – you want a piece of me!?
werefinup – uniform
We still use these terms today in our house!
While living in England I always laughed hearing the British say pasta, macho, taco, etc. because they pronounce the a’s short as in cat. In Oklahoma it was folks pronouncing oil as ‘url’. I love language and think that noticing the differences can be a fun experience as long as we’re not mocking.