The Japanese language is in trouble. The arrival of the
Digital Age finds it increasingly at the mercy of the media and the
marketplace, each better equipped today than at any other time in
history to shape society, culture, and the modern vernacular. The rush
towards globalization and eager pursuit of the technological tools that
facilitate it have created in Japan an environment of indiscriminate
assimilation, where the foreign appellations for emerging technologies
are cut-and-pasted from English directly into the various Japanese
media. The language of Nippon is being subtly transformed through a
reckless frenzy of linguistic borrowing, and rather than enrich the
language, this katakana revolution will ultimately only dilute
and pollute it.
The source of most of the recent imports is the computer industry at
large and the proliferating media that report on it. With the lion's
share of computer manufacturing, R&D, and software production being
conducted in the United States, it follows that a correspondingly large
portion of the latest computer terminology is English.
Magneto-Optical drive. Reduced Instruction Set Computing.
Web browser. America is the birthplace of the majority of the
coinages, and consequently English has become the lingua technotica
of the Digital Age.
This propagation of modern language across national borders is
inevitable, and various countries respond to it in uniquely different
ways. In France, legislation has been enacted to check the introduction
of foreign words by requiring their translation into French. Exporting
similar English terms to Chinese, on the other hand, faces no government
opposition, but does require the creation of corresponding new terms
using hanzi , or Chinese characters. In either case, the process
involves veritable translation from English to the respective languages.
The Japanese language, however, is equipped with a script designed
specifically for rendering foreign words, or gairaigo, called
katakana.
The function of gairaigo in Japanese might be compared to that of the
cache in a computer CPU or disk drive, where "data" is stored until the
system has the time or resources to process it. For much gairaigo enough
time has passed (decades or even hundreds of years) since its
introduction that it has simply become part of the language. However,
the technological vocabulary flooding into Japan today is unknown to the
vast majority of Japanese speakers. Held indefinitely in the cache these
terms exist in a kind of linguistic limbo, belonging to neither the
original language nor Japanese.
As we hurtle toward the 21st century the world by degrees
grows smaller, and the borders that divide us are crumbling. The primary
agents of change in this transformation--mass media, information
technology, and the Internet--have arrived in Japan, and they come laden
with more than the promise of increased productivity and CRT-driven
entertainment. This modern Black Ship will initiate sweeping changes in
the Japanese language, the repercussions of which may not be realized
until too late. In the course of this article I will highlight some of
the characteristics of what I call the Katakana Revolution, and
explain why it behooves us to pay close attention to the changes it is
causing in both Japan and Japanese.
Background
Gairaigo (loan words) have been a part of the Japanese
language for centuries. The first standardized characters used by the
Japanese were kanji imported from China in the 6th and 7th
century. Even the first native script, the phonetic kana
syllabary that the Japanese created to address the unsuitability of the
Chinese characters to express highly-inflected Japanese, is based on the
simplification of selected kanji. The transfer of language,
science and culture from China to a long-isolated Japan continued for
hundreds of years. As a result of this prolonged influence from the
Middle Kingdom, Japanese came to contain thousands of words of Chinese
origin. Much like the vestiges of Latin and Greek that exist as prefixes
and suffixes in English, these words (called kango) predominate
in the early sciences and medicine because the transfer of knowledge in
these fields coincided with the transfer of their lexicon . Centuries
later but in the same fashion, the period of rapid Westernization known
as the Meiji Restoration was characterized by the enthusiastic
importation of European language. The flood of words borrowed from the
West at that time was encouraged by the newly-formed Meiji government as
a means of accelerating the internationalization process, and received
little popular opposition. Even putting aside the considerable
borrowings from China and the West there still remains gairaigo
imported from Korean, Sanskrit, and the language of the aboriginal Ainu.
Considering Japan's history of linguistic borrowing, it stands to
reason that little impetus would exist among most observers, Japanese
and otherwise, to criticize or oppose the modern growth of
gairaigo, disregarding it as only the most recent and conspicuous
phase in the natural evolution of the language. Ignoring the trend on
the basis of this logic, however, may not necessarily be in our best
interests. Nor should we assume that we are somehow relegated to passive
observation, for since the changes I will discuss are taking place
today rather than in some remote historical niche we are afforded
the opportunity to evaluate, criticize, and even influence the way in
which the Japanese language evolves, or does not.
Some Problems with Gairaigo
Gairaigo is, by definition, "language from outside," and
distinguished in the written language by the use of katakana. Like
hiragana, katakana is a phonetic syllabary capable of expressing every
phoneme in Japanese. Where hiragana characters are cursive and flowing,
katakana are sharp and angular. This appearance lends them an aesthetic
quality that many Japanese, especially the younger generations, find
appealing. Words written with katakana are imbued with a visual quality
that is at once modern, foreign, hip and cutting-edge.
According to research conducted a decade or so ago, over 10 percent
of Japanese is gairaigo, and the numbers are growing. New words are
created all the time, the vast majority of them culled from English.
Certainly the mass media are in part responsible for propagating
gairaigo, but especially influential is Japan's monolithic advertising
industry which, in its zeal to entice consumers, employs English or
English-based constructions--often with little regard for English
grammar or context--in eye-catching slogans that enjoy vast popular
exposure, plastered as they are on TV screens, billboards and subway car
interiors like societal wallpaper.
The creation and dissemination of gairaigo leads to a number
of problems for speakers of Japanese, native and otherwise. Were it
always simply window dressing or advertising copy there might be little
reason for concern. However, language is by nature a communication
medium, and this is where the fundamental problems with gairaigo lie.
- Gairaigo is without intrinsic meaning
Importing a word from another language into Japanese
katakanafication, for lack of a better term) is a simple process.
One need not even know the meaning of the word that is being
imported, merely the sounds. The phonemes (units of sound) of the
original word are modified, slightly or a great deal, to correspond to
the closest equivalents found in Japanese. As Japanese is a language
with fewer distinct sounds than English, for example, this usually
results in a word that resembles the original only somewhat or not at
all.
It is important to note that the purpose of this process, though, is
not to strictly adhere to the original English, but rather to create a
word that can be vocalized using Japanese sounds and represented in
written Japanese. For example, If the imported word comes from English,
the Roman characters are discarded and replaced with katakana
that represent the sound of the word in Japanese syllables. So,
using this system to convert, say, "multimedia" into gairaigo
results in マルチメデｲア , or maruchimedeia
(mah-roo-chee-mee-deh-i-uh).
One obvious problem with this example is that the meaning intrinsic
to the English word multimedia, namely multi (from the
Latin multus, meaning much or many) and media (plural of
media), has been completely eliminated in the conversion process.
Where once the composition of the word provided a measure of insight
into its meaning, all that remains for the Japanese reader is a random
collection of sounds. Unfortunately this loss of meaning is a regular
byproduct of katakanafication, and thereby interferes with the
transmission of meaning between languages in the importation process.
- Gairaigo often displaces standard Japanese
It is much easier to remember and reproduce katakana than kanji,
which can be extremely complicated and number in the thousands.
Accordingly, many speakers and writers of Japanese develop a
predisposition for using foreign words in place of established yet more
difficult Japanese terms. Younger generations especially, with many more
hours in English classrooms or in front of the television, are more
likely to possess a lopsided, gairaigo-rich vocabulary and greater
difficulty reproducing and reading uncommon kanji. Because of this trend
many gairaigo words are replacing standard Japanese, and in general
terms this amounts to a shift away from kanji to the less expressive
katakana. This is a problem for the same reason cited in the previous
example: loss of intrinsic meaning. Just as prefixes and suffixes allow
English speakers to surmise the meaning of many English words, Japanese
has the corresponding benefit of kanji.
Most kanji impart meaning to the reader either ideographically or
pictographically, and are thus an excellent medium for conveying new
concepts. It is for this reason that a Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean)
reader can make an educated guess about the meaning of a word rendered
in kanji without having ever seen it before, provider he is familiar
with the characters that comprise it. Katakana, by contrast,
simply represent (foreign) sounds, and so initial comprehension of
gairaigo requires an appended explanation, a dictionary, or sufficient
familiarity with the source language.
In both scenarios, when English is imported as gairaigo or when
gairaigo displaces existing Japanese, a loss of the intrinsic meaning
occurs that reduces much of the words' usefulness as tools for
communication.
- Gairaigo is an obstacle to language learning
Gairaigo undermines and impedes the difficult process of language
learning for both Japanese students and foreigners studying Japanese.
For Japanese students, English is compulsory from middle through high
school, a total of six years. The spoken English taught in the classroom
(usually by Japanese instructors) has been subjected to katakanafication
for the benefit of Japanese speakers, and thereby stripped of many of
the very sounds necessary for aural comprehension by native speakers. As
ESL Professor Joseph Sheperd writes in The Internet TESL
Journal,"Stressing every syllable and adding a vowel at the end of the
word, [Japanese students of English] often sound as if they are reading
Katakana placed alongside of the words."
Add to that the problem of misinterpreting the huge number of English
words already in use as gairaigo and it is no mystery why so many
Japanese share a common dilemma: the inability to communicate orally in
English. The scope of this problem might best be measured by the
flourishing presence of eikaiwa (English conversation) schools, a
booming industry in Japan which markets courses that teach students how
to correctly pronounce the English they have been studying for
all these years.
Gairaigo can be a pitfall for the foreign student of Japanese as
well. Native English speakers are probably confronted with the greatest
number of loanwords from their own language, and tend to lean toward the
original pronunciation and interpretation of these words rather than
that used by Japanese. Equally vexing is the fact that although a word
may have numerous meanings distinguished by context in English, often
only one is used in Japanese. Additionally, since grammar is often
ignored in the importation process it is not uncommon for nouns to
become verbs, prepositions to become nouns, etc. Taken together, these
characteristics contribute significantly to the difficulty of learning
Japanese.
The growth of gairaigo is out of control, and the creation of new
words goes completely unchecked and unregulated. Many of the words used
today by youth and pop authors are unknown to well-educated, older
Japanese. Aside from guidelines for converting foreign sounds to those
found in Japanese, there are no rules that limit or regulate the
creation of new gairaigo.
This is indeed a problem for the reasons outlined above and others,
but more important is the scale of change taking place today. Certainly,
the process of importing and assimilating foreign words and language is
the natural result of inter-cultural communication and not worrisome in
and of itself. However, the rate of change and the sheer number of new
words arriving from abroad today has reached crisis proportions, and has
only been made possible through the technological advances of recent
decades.
Gairaigo and the Information Age
The global diffusion of communications technology in the latter half
of this century has ushered in an Information Age, where digitized data,
culture, and language streak continuously across obsolete borders via
satellite broadcast or the ubiquitous Internet, and instantaneous
communication through a variety of media is simply taken for granted.
The Internet is especially relevant in any discussion of Japan, a
country which has experienced 84% growth in the number of Internet hosts
since January of this year (Source: Network Wizards InterNIC survey,
July 1996). Japan is the fastest growing large-scale Internet market in
the world, and at the current growth rate will surpass both the United
Kingdom and Germany to occupy the number two position after the United
States in only two years. To be sure, Japan is getting connected. But
what does this portend for the Japanese language?
The Net was born in America, as was much of most recent and most
significant computing technology. Although once upon a time the language
of science and technology in Japan was based on Chinese, the vocabulary
of the Digital Age, spawned in the computer rooms of Bell Laboratories
and UC Berkeley, is overwhelmingly English. Virtually any Japanese
computer magazine today (and there are many) is filled with technical
jargon that has been imported part and parcel from English. Detailed
discussions of video interlacing techniques or parallel processing are
rife with specialized English terms and acronyms whose meaning would be
lost on most native English speakers, yet are present nonetheless in
katakana form.
The use of katakana and this method of dealing with gairaigo reveal a
growing trend for choosing transliteration over translation in the
fields of engineering and computer technology. The practice, however, is
a modern contrivance that seems curious when you consider similar
technological advances earlier this century and the way in which their
jargon was adapted to Japanese.
Take, for example, RF electronics. When the technology fundamental to
modern cellular telephony, RADAR, and radio was first developed early in
this century, new vocabulary were created for concepts such as
electromagnetic waves, signal modulation, RF propagation, etc. At that
time the translation of RF terminology into Japanese was done mostly
conceptually, using existing words or characters to render the new
terms. The use of kanji facilitated this process by conveying the
ideas associated with the words rather than the sounds. This
method allowed Japanese, or anyone with a knowledge of kanji, to
understand to a certain degree the meaning of the new terms without
having been exposed to them previously. Consider the examples of
fundamental RF terminology as they exist in English and Japanese in the
left-hand portion of Table 1:
Table 1. Translation Past and Present
|
RF Terminology |
Computer Terminology |
| frequency |
周波数 |
network |
ナットワーク |
| wavelength |
波長 |
peer-to-peer |
ピアツーピア |
| amplification |
増幅 |
multimedia |
マルチメデｲア |
| bipolar |
正反対 |
microprocessor |
マイクロプロセッサ |
| wireless |
無線 |
modem |
モデム |
| reception |
受信 |
throughput |
スループット |
| transmission |
転送 |
memory |
メモリ |
| phase |
移送 |
fixed disk |
ハードヂスク |
| FM |
周波変調 |
protocol |
プロトコル |
Electromagnetic energy is described in terms of "waves" because as it
travels through space is exhibits many properties associated with liquid
waves including oscillation, peaks and troughs, repetition frequency,
and wavelength to name a few. Just as in English, the wave concept for
RF energy exists in Japanese terminology in the form of the character 波
(nami, or wave). Fundamental as it is to our perception of
electromagnetic energy, it naturally appears often in the list of
examples above.
Next, if we turn our attention to the right-hand portion of Table 1
and study some the words that are being created to express basic
concepts related to computing and networking, it is clear that no effort
has been made to translate the English words into corresponding
Japanese. Instead, merely the sounds of the original English have been
imported. Although Japanese characters could have been employed to
translate the concepts above, thereby making comprehension of the
words far simpler for literate Japanese, but transliteration was chosen
instead.
The obvious problem with this pattern is that the Japanese public,
confronted with the current flood of new technological ideas and
terminology, are being forced to absorb them in what is essentially a
foreign language. In the excited dash towards globalization and the
economic potential it holds for a resource-weak Japan, the Japanese will
be making the trip on linguistic crutches. Whose idea was this, anyway?
Agents of Change
The long-awaited ascension of the personal computer in Japan has
begun, and what for so long has been exclusively a tool of the workplace
is becoming increasingly common in living rooms from Sapporo to
Kumamoto. It has finally become a toy, a surfboard, and a desk
reference. In short, the computer has become, well, personal. PC
fever rages in Japan and the Internet is red hot. The computer industry
here and abroad is frantically striving to meet the demands of the
burgeoning Japanese PC market, and competition among vendors and
manufacturers is fierce.
Microsoft has entered the fray with typical determination and
adroitness, and through a combination of shrewd partnerships and savvy
marketing has slowly but effectively wrested the Japanese software
market from the grip of industry leaders such as Just Systems and NEC.
Windows 3.1 and 95 are now the industry standard operating systems for
Intel-based PC's, and Microsoft's flagship applications in the three
categories that count--word processors, databases, and spreadsheets--
have secured the number one slot in each. Microsoft Office commands an
impressive 51% of the office suite market as of May 1996 (Source:
Business Computer News, Computer News, Inc.). None of this
phenomenal success in the foreign Japanese market, however, would have
been possible without localization.
Localization, according to Ken Lunde's Understanding Japanese
Information Processing, is "the process of adapting software (or
hardware) such that it conforms to the expectations of a specific
country. This often includes rewriting menus and dialogs into the target
language, but sometimes involves more complex changes, such as handling
special character encoding methods." Mr. Lunde also employs the term
Japanization in the same book to refer to the localization of
software for the Japanese market. However, japanization and my
own coinage katakanafication are not interchangeable terms. Here
is why.
Windows95 and the new 32-bit versions of MS applications clearly
reflect the current trend of exploiting katakana to merely
transliterate, not translate, from English to Japanese in the course of
program localization. The programs are rife with examples of words that
aren't English but rather Microsoft copyrighted coinages that have been
converted to Japanese through katakanafication. Not surprisingly, the
resulting ambiguities often lead to frustration on the part of the
mystified Japanese user. In a recent issue of the Japanese computer
magazine Interface, Osaka University Professor Satoshi Kawata
recounts his frustration at trying to use the "Japanese" version of MS
Excel. "It's so difficult to use I can hardly stand it, " he laments.
Commands like "Add-in Manager" and "Pivot Table" that have simply been
rendered in katakana are, according to Professor Kawata, "hard to read
and difficult to understand."
And it's not just Microsoft. If anything, some of the other software
giants, Novell Inc. and Lotus Corp. among them, are just as guilty of
this disservice to the Japanese consumer. User manuals for the Japanese
version of cc:Mail, for example, are notoriously difficult to read,
filled as they are with mysterious constructions like ピアツーピア
(Peer-to-Peer) and スタンドアロン (Stand Alone). Are we to assume that the
localization team for this project was incapable of producing
corresponding Japanese terms from the canonical expanse of the language?
Is "stand alone" such an arcane, inscrutable concept that these
translation professionals eventually threw up their hands in defeat and
settled on katakana?
This practice would not present a significant problem were it not for
the fact that these products, notably those coming out of Redmond,
Washington, will almost certainly come to dominate the Japanese software
market. The natural consequence of this is that the terminology chosen
by them and employed in their application software and user manuals will
become the industry standard and, eventually, part of Japanese itself
through simple mass exposure. The reason for this is that application
software is the birthplace of the computer argot. A decade ago in the US
the words "cut and paste " or "double-click" would have fallen on mostly
deaf ears, but today they help comprise the foundation of a fast-growing
digital idiom. This pattern is inevitable, and gives monolithic
corporate entities like Microsoft an unsettling degree of power to
influence and define the development of language.
Realistically speaking, software manufacturers will always place
their own interests first when choosing the verbiage used in their
programs. The expectations and background of the user, for example, must
be considered in order to produce a product that is easy to use yet
powerful, and therefore marketable. In some cases this may mean
standardizing the terminology and placement of often used menu commands
(such as "Open File" or "Select All"), but in other cases the motivation
may be less altruistic. By defining the lexicon of the user interface at
the OS level and then dictating that other software producers conform,
industry leader Microsoft has been able to foist its own copyrighted
terminology on the industry as a whole. A brief perusal of Windows 95
environment yields a handful of examples: Properties,
Shortcut, Toolbar, Wizard. The dictatorial
standardization of these terms by Microsoft is designed to condition the
computing masses to be familiar with and comfortable in the Windows
environment. Ultimately, this is simply another means for assuring their
current and future dominance of the computer industry. In Japan the
objective is no different, and the extremely popular "Japanese" version
of Windows 95 comes shipped with all of the important MS terms
predictably intact: プロパテｲ , ショートカット , ツールバー , ウｲザード , among others.
Unfortunately, however, the interests of the computer industry
obviously have very little to do with considering the long-term impact
on language or the evolution of translation methodologies. By endorsing
transliteration as a viable alternative to translation in their
localization efforts, the products of which will enjoy singular
prominence on desktops in homes and offices throughout Japan, these
titans are burdening Japanese consumers with unnecessary ambiguity and
corrupting the language, all the while telling translators and anyone
else paying attention that it's okay to do so.
What is perhaps most perplexing about the current flood of gairaigo
and the computing sector's active role in it is the apparent lack of
criticism of the matter. One among the few voices of concern in the
Japanese media is that of Professor Kawata. In his Interface
article, he advocates the use of a system called Ruby to
address the various problems associated with the use of gairaigo in
Japanese. The system basically involves using katakana in superscript
form above foreign terminology (much like furigana), be it a
computer term or a Chinese person's name, in order to both preserve the
components of the original word(s) and provide the correct pronunciation
in Japanese. The idea is a good one, and certainly addresses some
important issues, but I would argue that we need to go further.
Attempting to reduce the number of copyrighted terms and coinages in
software programs would be futile because these terms often distinguish
the various vendors from one another and are thus essential for market
competitiveness. In other words, quibbling over the transliteration of a
Microsoft-ism like Wizard into the Japanese version of Word©
would be a waste of time. The area that more deserves our attention is
general terminology that isn't trademarked and exists abundantly in the
industry vernacular. These are words that seem to have mystified the
translation community and as such are in copious use as simple gairaigo.
These are words like digital, hypertext, browser, client-server, macro,
peer-to-peer, display, PIM, OCR, chip, refresh rate, memory, controller,
and about a zillion others. Omitting laziness, incompetence, or a
particular love for katakana there is no good reason why these terms
cannot be rendered in authentic Japanese.
It is possible, of course, that the problem is simply a lack of
consensus. Since no governing body exists for handling the creation of
new words, a lack of direction or guidelines in the area of localization
is hardly surprising. For many in the translation field, for example,
the use of katakana as a kind of interim translation may be less
intimidating that actually coining a new word and offering it for public
scrutiny and evaluation. With this in mind and in hope of contributing
to positive change, I offer the following as rough guidelines for those
who work in the areas of localization and translation:
- The serious work of creating language should not be taken lightly,
and the decision whether to translate or transliterate is an important
one whose consequences should be considered well. In terms of ease of
comprehension, which is better for introduction to native Japanese
speakers, an unknown (katakana) gairaigo term, or an unknown Japanese
word rendered in kanji or hiragana?
- Since countries such as China and Taiwan use Chinese characters as
well and do not have the convenience of a phonetic script for handling
foreign terms, an occasional look at Chinese translations could prove
instructive.
- Translators working on the bleeding edge of technology, the source
of most of the latest terminology, should be willing to consult
with those who specialize in language itself when considering new
terms. Linguists and educators are well-placed to contribute
positively in the translation process, and their input should be
considered invaluable.
- Consensus among all of the parties involved--engineers,
translators, journalists, and linguists alike--is the best means at
our disposal for ensuring that the changes we make to Japanese today
will be in the best interests of the speakers and users of Japanese.
In conclusion, let me say that what motivates me in this area is
nothing less than a love for Japanese and the profound dismay I feel
seeing it casually discarded more and more often in favor of gairaigo.
Japanese is an amazingly rich language with great expressive power, and
there is no good reason why it should be supplanted by English in the
21st century.
It is my hope that the people more in a position to make a difference
will share my concerns and help restore translation as the standard.
Should they choose to do otherwise, to leave the fate of Japanese to
Bill Gates or the staff writers of computer magazines, to sit idly by as
the myriad problems related to gairaigo multiply, and to wring their
hands in dismay when the dictionary fails to produce a corresponding
term, they will ultimately count themselves as accomplices in the
dumbing-down of Japanese and all of Japan.