We’ve all done it (at least, those of us who live in Korea with cameras have): walking around town, we’ve spotted a menu, or a sign, and snickered at the poor English thereupon, laughed at the fact the t-shirt wearer clearly doesn’t know what it means. It doesn’t take much work to pull out the camera and take a picture that will be a source of amusement for the folks back home, where ALL signs are done in perfect English, and every municipality employs a proof-reader.
Seriously, though, it doesn’t take THAT much effort to run a sign or poster or menu or website layout by a nearby native English speaker, does it? Especially now that more and more of us live here. . .
Anyway, Joy asked an interesting question over at Roboseyo today, when I posted exactly those kinds of pictures.
Along with another one coming up later, I’d mocked this sign, for “Non-GMO Soju,” saying that was kind of like organic cigarettes: who cares if it’s non-GMO; it’s still soju.
Joy countered with this in the comments:
Roboseyo…. do you have any fear that by taking a picture of something like a sign in Korea is taking it out of context?
In my hagwon training the the guy showed us a sign that was taken in Korea. It was funny…but the image made people think something bad about Koreans. When really the sign was just an advertisement.
The point of his lecture is that a lot of people take images from Korea and put them up and say something silly about it. And that it eventually grows this impression on westerners that Korea is this messed up society.
Now that I have been here I would say that Korean signs, are yes funny. Especially when they play on English.
But I wonder what affect our taking it out of context and laughing at has on Korea’s image?
Perhaps none. ?
This was the sign in question at the time.
My initial thoughts are this:
First, while a site that pulls signs like that completely out of context, like say, Engrish.com, which basically exists to say “haw haw! Furraners are horrible at English!” might be guilty of doing that, even there, Engrish.com isn’t targeting the Japanese for embarrassment, or any other country; they’ll put up a mangled English sign from Switzerland as soon as another goofy PSA from Japan or China, so their target is people with bad English, not some people or race.
Second, I think that the sign IS in the context of the rest of my blog, where I sound forth on all things Korea in many different ways, from very positive to harshly critical, and is not held up as “Look how dumb Koreans are” but as “Look at this goofy sign I saw.”
I also often think that if you’re willing to put a sign up without running it by anyone who might know something you don’t about the language you’re using, well, you’re kind of making yourself fair game, aren’t you?
What do you think, Sparklers? Was I taking cheap shots, or just adding a bit of extra goofy texture to a culture-shock themed photo collection? And IS Korea’s image abroad diminished by signs and t-shirts like these circulating?
Personally, I’ve always thought exporting Konglish T-shirts like this one to North America would be a great way to start a business: you know the same hipsters who love wearing ironic T-Shirts would LOVE to get their hands on a shirt like this, and pop the goofiest English they could find.
15/10/2008 at 12:03 am Permalink
Posted at my site, from Brian:
Maybe, but I think the bad English does a good enough job of making Korea look bad. I don’t think it makes Koreans or Asians look stupid, but it makes their English look terrible. Because it is. I mean, my Korean sucks, too, so does my German. But then again I don’t go around trying to make money off those languages, or trying to misrepresent those cultures by badly screwing up those languages. If Koreans, or expats in Korea, don’t want their English mocked, make some effort to get it right. Unfortunately, a combination of pride and indifference prevent that from happening. I get that cultures all over the world make languages their own—although we get laughed at should we make the slightest mistake in Korean—but it’s disrespectful to the larger language community of English speakers to pay no regard to how they use the language. Don’t get me started.
Sorry, Rob Dog, I can’t post on Korea Sparkle, so thus it’s here.
(rob here: btw: is somebody looking into the fact there are people who can’t post at the hub? Brian says the comment window’s here, but there’s no “submit” button. . . is it a browser thing, or a login thing?)
15/10/2008 at 12:47 am Permalink
I don’t think this is that much of an issue. People know about translation problems and so on. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard (monolingual) Americans joke about how they can’t really be sure that subtitles in their movies are correct, or Chinese tattoos, etc.
So I don’t think Koreans would have a legitimate point to complain about here. I think the Japanese could make a stronger case against because “Japan is weird” is such an entrenched meme in the west, aided by far too many out-of-context videos and pictures to count.
15/10/2008 at 5:02 am Permalink
If you use a language you are not competent in to make signs or whatever, or wear clothes that exhibit the same, it is you yourself who are at fault, and you leave yourself wide open to ridicule. I wouldn’t wear a Korean t-shirt sporting a message I couldn’t understand…..well, not in Korea, anyway. But I think I would be fine in Canada with a raunchy Korean slogan pasted on my back, whether I knew what it meant or not. Very few people, other than in some areas of larger centers like Vancouver or Toronto, would know the difference.
Perhaps that’s the key. No matter what kind of English is on your t-shirt in Korea, most people won’t bother to read it, or won’t know what it means if they do. The other thing is the lack of emotive impact of a foreign language, unless you are intimately familiar with it. It means that, while the words on the shirt above jump right off the page at us English natives, it would likely have much less impact on Koreans, even those who ‘conceptually’ know what the words mean. They just don’t have a context of experience in which to place those particular words.
Consider the respective results in your grade four English class when you yell HEY! and YA! I bet the second one gets you a much bigger heads up.
15/10/2008 at 9:28 am Permalink
Roboseyo,
I think you weren’t really doing any harm by adding these pics on your blog and making comments. The imagery though sparked in my mind this issue.
All in all though it is not just a Korean thing but spread across Asia. Engrish.com is infamous for showing where English has gone wrong…from any country.
I think what is interesting is the passivity towards people knowing whether it is correct or not.
Actually I find the t-shirts to be collectible because they inheritintly become symbols of the token that English language has here in Asia.
On the flip side, when Americans would get Chinese character tatoos on their body, I think most of them didn’t really know their true meaning. When I was dating a Chinese guy he found it so funny and dumb that Americans would have Chinese character tatoos or wear clothing with the characters on it.
In a sense, this is just fashion and is a gimmick. People but the English on T-shirts because it is a fashion sense, whether it comes out right…well. I actually think a computer just slaps these designs on a t-shirt and that no one is fact checking it. Which makes sense if it is pouring out of a cheap factory somewhere.
Anyways thanks for putting this up for the larger audience!!
15/10/2008 at 9:30 am Permalink
sorry my own English can suck as well!
15/10/2008 at 10:19 am Permalink
The fault may lie more with the people printing shirts that say things like “Too drunk to fuck,” or “Fuckin freezin,” or “I drink 5 beers everyday its my hobby,” (I saw a middle schooler wearing this one.) Suppose someone printed a T-shirt that said “I’m a necrophiliac chicken rapist!!,” and then sold it to people who don’t know any better, who is to blame if you take a picture of that? Maybe the most progressive action to take is to tell people that what they are wearing is innapropriate. I remember seeing a middle aged woman wearing a d squared shirt that said “Fuckin design t-shirt company.” If someone politely explained that to her, she might return to the store where she bought it and give the shopkeep an earfull. This might prompt the store to stop selling things like that. Its kind of like that Kimbab grandma video. During the beef protests, a young man punched an old woman in the face and no one did anything, some guy just took a cellphone camera video.
15/10/2008 at 12:53 pm Permalink
For all the bad Engrish shirts I see here in Korea (and when I used to live in Japan), I saw a heck of a lot of bad-Chinese _tatoos_ living in the states. Seriously, as dumb as a lot of these T-shirts are, just imagine how idiotic you must be to get some Chinese characters that you _think_ mean “Super-powerful mega-awesome dood!” put permanently on your forearms or butt-cheeks. (I notice joyboto has made a similar point.)
I don’t think it makes any of it right. For some reason, Koreans and Asians in general think of English as connoting coolness and wealth. And for some reason, lots of Americans think of Asian writing as connoting mystery and exoticness and difference (think a pop-culture version of Edward Said’s “Orientalism”).
So I’m in no position to answer the question, just complicate it some more. Beyond that, check out a recent post on my blog entitled “Horrors of Engrish” if you want to see the infamous “N*ggas Love Blonds” T-shirt from Dongdaemun (it was on sale everywhere).
Highly NSFW:
http://wetcasements.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/dongdaemun-yeesh.jpg
The stupid English I can live with. But the outright offensive terminology is a really bad idea. I mean, can you imagine if a Korean visited Los Angeles wearing that thing?
15/10/2008 at 2:22 pm Permalink
Hmm, you know you all make good points. I believe that many Koreans know the meaning of the English words that they are using, expecially the buyers of these shirts if not the makers themselves. Many people mentioned the stupidy of people in the States with Chinese characters that are screwed up, but comparatively, and in the defense of the adventurous Westerners, Chinese is not as pervasive in the States as English is in Korea. It’s normal for you to see someone flip their cell phone to the English/Korean dictionary function to find out what words mean. Many of the shows on TV are in English, and now most students take Englsih throughout most of their pre-college lives. They know what the words mean!
I like to think that the reason why we see so many crazy signs is because Koreans are just funny and are having a good time with a language that doesn’t hold as much weight as their native language. It’s being countercultural/safely testing limits.
15/10/2008 at 2:47 pm Permalink
As Joy has pointed out, using a “foreign” language can create an aura of “cool” or hipness around the wearer. (I put foreign in quotation marks as a way to emphasize it in the context of being strange, rather than just different. I doubt there’s an equivalent trend in France regarding German or Italian on account of their close proximity and shared histories.)
Yeah, all the Chinese (or Japanese) tattoos in the west parallel Engrish shirts in East Asia, and I blogged about a different cross-language faux pas last year, although this one involved the marketing execs at Snapple. The label from one of their products read: “Scientists call it EGCG, tea farmers call it 茶”. Hooray for using Chinese characters, but that segment, when translated, reads: “tea farmers call it tea”. Do tea farmers really call it tea? Imagine that! Having taken place at Snapple, this isn’t just a random guy’s attempt at pressing a few shirts for some extra cash.
I like Jaim’s comment about “pop cultural Orientalism” — pop culture is forever borrowing from other cultures/sub-cultures to find something new and exciting. Whether this is Thai food being the current “it” thing worldwide (has that trend faded?), poor English on Korean t-shirts, or poorly-conceived Chinese tattoos, I think pop culture usually takes the product out of its original context for easier consumerability. With that being the case, some mild remarks and photo-blogging of not-so-perfect examples of cross-language use don’t seem that bad.
Can you take an already out of context aspect of culture (in this case, language) and take that out of context? Or is it simply furthering the out-of-context-ness of the original?
15/10/2008 at 2:52 pm Permalink
(rob here: btw: is somebody looking into the fact there are people who can’t post at the hub? Brian says the comment window’s here, but there’s no “submit” button. . . is it a browser thing, or a login thing?)
I tried leaving my comment through Internet Explorer at work and saw the comment text box but no ‘submit’ button as well. (We’re running IE 6.0 here) Downloading Mozilla Firefox seems to have solved that problem for me.
While I’m (kind of) on that subject, how does approving moderated comments work? I posted a bit more info to the Gansong Art Musem post and my comment is still awaiting moderation despite other comments (posted at a later time) showing up. It wasn’t my first comment on the site and I posted from the same computer and the same web browser as I used for the first one. Was it because I included some links in the post?
15/10/2008 at 3:22 pm Permalink
have you ever been to Rhode Island? now there is where you will see some funny Engrish.
15/10/2008 at 4:02 pm Permalink
I suppose no one has thought to go:
“Dead Kennedys! Wooo!”?
If not, I’ve just officially done it.
15/10/2008 at 4:06 pm Permalink
FWIW, Firefox seems to work fine. That’s what I’m using.
16/10/2008 at 1:17 pm Permalink
As said earlier, many Koreans who wear shirts with garbled English do in fact understand at least some of what is going on – let’s face it, how many teenage Koreans do we know who don’t know naughty words in English? The words may not have the same social meaning, but the kids know what they’re roughly equivalent to (although this is a problem too, because swearing in English and swearing in Korean have slightly different uses and meanings . . . so even equivalent words aren’t equivalent in use . . .bah, I ramble!)
That brings us to another point I think we’re circling around: Wearing these shirts in Korea that are produced for Koreans is assuming a very different audience than the foreigners who see Engrish and are amused or offended. The graphic element of foreign text is one that lots of people find pleasant to look at, and people enjoy the design element more than the content. I’m not saying this to excuse truly offensive slogans but we should keep in mind that we as foreigners and fluent English speakers are not the intended market or audience. Likewise, when people in the Americas or Europe or elsewhere get characters tattooed on our bodies without significant knowledge of the nuance, well, . . . we’re not generally trying to impress Chinese readers. Thank God.
Yeah, it’s a little interesting to see an otherwise respectably dressed middle-aged woman whose t shirt declares that she . . . uh . . . enjoys warm relationships with celebrities, but how empty would our lives be without it! And how sad would the tattoo artists of Miami ink be if they could no longer brand strapping young men as “power man person”?