(If you read this partway through and don't read to the end, you'll
probably be misunderstanding me. Maybe.)
My sister shared this with me:
Some Japanese translator thinks his English skills are better than they
really are?
I can think of a few more possibilities, from my experience, each as likely as
the other:
- Translator is not a native speaker of either English or Japanese.
- Translator is a native speaker of English, but has been handed a really long list of short phrases to attempt a translation of, and has been given one hour. The translator thinks he or she will be able to come back to this one and fix it, but the manager says, no, we've only budgeted for an hour. English is English. First translation is good enough.
(Actually, I can think of a few more possibilities, such as direct cut-and-paste from Google Translate or pure fabrication, but the above three possibilities are the most likely.)
Just for grins, let's look at a semi-mechanical translation to see where things might have gone wrong. Here's the text:
トイレをきれいに使って頂いてありがとうございます。
Parse it out:
トイレ を｜きれい に｜使って 頂いて｜ありがとう ございます。
Toire wo kirei ni tsukatte itadaite, arigatō gozaimasu.
Look at meanings of vocabulary and grammatical elements:
トイレ: toire => toilet/washroom/restroom/wc
を: wo (general objective particle)
トイレを: toire wo => restroom (as the direct object of the verb)
きれい: kirei => prettiness/cleanliness/elegance/politeness/precision
に: ni (general adverbial particle)
きれいに: kirei ni => prettily/cleanly/elegantly/politely/precisely/carefully
使って （つかって）: tsukatte => continuative/participle form of 使う
使う （つかう）: tsukau => use (verb)
頂いて （いただいて）: itadaite => continuative/participle form of 頂く
頂く （いただく）: itadaku => partake/obtain {=>get, polite form} (verb)
使って頂いて （つかっていただいて）: tsukatteitadaite => (that we have been able to get {subject} to) use {verb}
ありがとう: arigatou => formal form of ありがたい
ありがたい: arigatai => hard to accept/appreciatable/grateful (adjective)
ございます: gozaimasu => formal be verb with formal ending
ありがとうございます: arigatō gozaimasu => (We are/I am) (very) grateful/thankful (for {objective phrase}). (Literally, {subject} has great gratitude)
Select appropriate meanings and move things into English order:
We are grateful that we have been able to have you use the restroom facilities carefully and cleanly.
Too much translationism, so we want to optimize it a bit, and we can go several slightly different ways. A few of those might be
We appreciate your being willing to use these facilities carefully.
But, nah. Go one more step in this direction:
Thank you for being careful in the restroom.
Or, be more American and turn it into an explicit request:
Please use the restroom cleanly.
I'm not sure which dialect to assign this to:
Thank you for your consideration of others when using the washroom.
Now, having worked through all of this, we can see that the original translation as it was is not really all that bad. It feels funny, but it communicates the idea.
Which brings me to ...
Oh. I've cast aspersions at the current most prevelant economic attitudes already. You did notice that, didn't you?
Let's look at this again, from a slightly different point of view.
Native speakers of English are by far not (I repeat, not) the most common readers of English signage in Japan. People come from China, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Micronesia, Korea, South America, Mars, ...
Hmm. Maybe not Mars. Maybe. But all these people have a few things in common. One of those is that they are probably somewhat conversant in some probably-simplified subset of English, but English is not their native tongue.
Moreover, when we say "simple English", even though there have been multiple attempts at defining "simple international English", there is no practical, commonly spoken simple English, any more than Esperanto has achieved consensus status as the international language (even for Europe).
Chinese as the international language? No one really wants that. (No one but the Chinese communist party.) Three orders of magnitude too many charaters to learn. (Well more than 30,000, just for ordinary educated adult living.) Even if the construction could be regularized and the radicals could be taught as the basic alphabet, with the constructed characters being taught as root words, or something similar, there is an order of magnitude too many radicals. (More than 500.)
Would the original translation be okay for international, non-native English speakers?
I don't know. According to Wiktionary, urinate, precision, and elegance are defined in simple English.
But does that justify management in refusing to allow the translator time to go back and attempt to make a decent translation? Does it justify management in pushing the translator to make assembly-line translations in the first place?
I don't know about this one, either. I have been that translator. I could not deal with the mode of work, and that is why I don't translate for a living. You can't starve your workers and expect them not to die.
Modern society is a society of affluence without meaning. Affluence without meaning sounds a lot like effluence. We are doing the same things to our economic environment that we are doing to our physical environment, poisoning it by overproduction.
It's true that one man's waste is another man's treasure. Bad translation would seem to be better than none at all.
But there ought to be a better way. All the mechanical help that we have should be giving the common worker time to find meaning, and to give the common consumer a better flow of product to choose from.
If the guys at the top of the consumption pyramid were not taking all the profits and all the power to themselves, trying too hard to be king of some meaningless hill -- they could pay the workers enough to take the time to get the job done; they could hire more workers to cover the work that needs to be done; they could put out product that gives consumers more meaningful options.
