Japan

A pet peeve of mine is Chinese character tattoos. These are often translations of some sentiment the victim wishes to express in code, but have been translated in a way that probably won’t make sense to a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese. In other cases, they are unidiomatic or just plain wrong.

Take a gander at the two kanji above. The one on the left, å’Œ, is the character for “peace,” popular as a tattoo, on T-shirts, decorative rocks, etc. The one on the right looks exactly the same, but for one crucial stroke. In fact, it is not an actual character at all (near as I can tell), though my first guess was that it means “apricot” (I was close: 杏). It is the one on the right that I saw tattooed on the small of a woman’s back on Sunday.

What’s the correct etiquette in this situation? Should I tell her “Hey, I know you wanted the character for ‘peace’ tattooed on your back, but you wound up with something that sorta looks like ‘apricot'”? Or should I leave her in blissful ignorance, as an inside joke for those of us who know the code?

Later: Apparently other people are writing about this problem too.

Kenkyusha is readying a new version (link in Japanese) of its New Japanese-English Dictionary. Despite its many faults, it is considered the standard J-E dictionary, and is referred to by Japanese translators as the Green Goddess, or GG for short. It is interesting that the product announcement explicitly refers to this. On the Honyaku mailing list, Tom Gally writes:

The chief in-house editor of the dictionary
at Kenkyusha first learned that the dictionary has this nickname from
Mayumi Nishioka, a long-time Honyaku contributor, when she contacted
him in 1995 about a term that had been discussed on Honyaku.

Purchasers of this dictionary may note other connections between
Honyaku and the new GG, including terms and translations that have
been discussed on this list in the past and several familiar names
among the contributors.

It is a minor sport among J-E translators to point out bizarre entries in this dictionary, many of which seem preserved from the first edition in 1918–it still contains entries like 鉄道馬車 tetsudo basha or horse-drawn railway car. The fourth edition was released in 1974, and one gets the impression that new glosses were tacked on to the end of existing ones, so one often must skip to the end of the entry to get the most helpful definition. The example sentences also have an antique quality, like “give a wrench at the doorknob.” Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to see how new the fifth edition is.