Engrish
An example of "bad translation" Engrish, taken in Tokyo, Japan, in the year 2000
These instructions for a "Puzzle Ball" are a paradigmatic example of Engrish, featuring the rather interesting slogan: "LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING." Found in Oregon in 2003
Engrish is a slang term which refers to an English language phrase that arose through poor translation from another language (usually Japanese), or sometimes, poor translation of English into another language followed by good translation back into English. It is usually considered by English-speakers as a humorous misuse of English. Engrish also refers to the deliberately careless or mistaken use of English words in advertising, for example, as "exotic" embellishment.
The term Engrish is a pun on Japanese and a few other East Asian languages that do not have separate sounds for R and L. Japanese has a sound pronounced with the tongue halfway between an English speaker's L and R, and native speakers of Japanese often inadvertently reverse L and R sounds when speaking English; hence English becomes Engrish.
Engrish also refers to normal mispronunciation of English in a funny way. In spoken Japanese, for example, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes Eric Crapton, "McDonald's" becomes Makkudonarudo. Japanese, having only five vowels, few consonant clusters and no distinct "L" sound, tends to cause mangling in a manner particularly humorous to English speakers. Japanese uses over 600 imported English words in common speech; such as beesubooru for "baseball", hankachi for "handkerchief", fooku (fo-o-ku) for fork, teeburu (te-e-bu-ru) "table", puroresu for "pro wrestling", and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the distortion, the more it's considered to qualify as being Engrish.
Engrish used to be a frequent occurrence in consumer electronics product manuals, which might say something like "to make speed up find up out document", but it is less frequent today. Another source of poor translation is an unchecked machine-produced translation, such as that from the Babelfish service or Google Language Tools.
Engrish features prominently in Japanese pop culture, as some young Japanese people consider the English language cool and trendy. Japanese has assimilated a great deal of vocabulary from English recently, and many popular Japanese songs and television themes will feature a disjointed phrase or two in English among the mostly Japanese lyrics. Japanese marketing firms both noticed and helped to create this popularity, and create an enormous array of advertisements, products, and clothing marked with English phrases that seem highly amusing and/or inexplicably bizarre to a native English speaker.
Poor Chinese English (or a mixture of Chinese and English) is sometimes referred to as Chinglish. These terms are sometimes considered pejorative, as it implicitly ridicules people whose native language is not English. In comparison, English speakers who embarrass themselves trying to speak other languages are sometimes described as embarazado.
Alternately, some idiosyncratic usages of English among a community that is largely bilingual (Spanglish, Yinglish) have names with more neutral connotations, and are applied largely to people whose skills in English are more at par with society in general.
The phrase "all your base are belong to us" from the game Zero Wing is a well-known example of Engrish. Another example is "going faster is the system job" written on computer cooling-fans manufactured by a company called Titan.
Sometimes Engrish is employed deliberately for an amusing or exotic effect, just as Han Chinese kanji characters or letters of the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets are equivalently used in Western society (usually incorrectly) as a graphical embellishment. Similarly, in English, umlauts, accents, misspellings, and "o's with slashes" are added to give an exotic look to otherwise ordinary phrases like Mötley Crüe and Hägar the Hørrible (see heavy metal umlaut)— or Häagen-Dazs. See also French phrases used by English speakers for examples of how distortion or deliberate change of meaning can take place.
The use of Japanese by English speakers to sound trendy (usually attributed to fans of anime) is fanji.
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