15 Racist "transcription" of Japanese loanwords: "sararii man", "besuboru", ...
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This article is from the Japanese FAQ, by TANAKA Tomoyuki tanaka@cs.indiana.edu and Olaf Meeuwissen olaf@IMSL.shinshu-u.ac.jp with numerous contributions by others.
15 Racist "transcription" of Japanese loanwords: "sararii man", "besuboru", ...
narrow-minded white Americans (journalists and others)
take particular delight in "phonetically transcribing"
loanwords in Japanese,
e.g. as "sararii man", "besuboru", "saabisu opution".
why do these narrow-minded white Americans use these
strange transcriptions instead the more obvious
"salary man", "baseball", "service option"?
1. because this B/V (or R/L) thing is one of the
standard ways that monocultural, monolingual white
Americans make fun of the Japanese.
2. because these monocultural, monolingual white
Americans intend subtle cultural/racial mockery.
we (Mr Okada, i, and many others) object to this kind of
gratuitous insult, a subtle cultural/racial mockery by
monocultural, monolingual white Americans.
Note that these same narrow-minded white Americans never
use similar "transcriptions" to emphasize how the French
don't pronounce the H sounds, or how Mexican Spanish
does not distinguish between B and V.
http://www.mars.dti.ne.jp/~ja1rna/yakyu/yakyu.html
[from a TIME magazine article containing much prejudice
toward the Japanese]
"Japanese besuboru is not exactly the same as
American baseball."
[Mr Okada's comment] I don't like to see such deformed
pronunciation (Japalish?) in written form, which sounds
sarcastic and derogatory to Japanese.
finally, how should this type of insensitive (phonetic)
"transcription" of katakana loanwords be avoided?
very simple. journalists should learn the nature of
this insensitive practice. if it can not be done in a
non-arrogant/non-patronizing way, it should not be done.
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