|
Don't Let Your Kanji Tattoo Get "Lost In Translation"
By: Stephen Munday
Thinking of getting a kanji tattoo or kanji jewelry? Then arm yourself with this information before you buy anything. It may be the difference between being cool and national humiliation. What? National humiliation? Well OK, national humiliation is an unlikely outcome, but an article in the March 1st, 2005 Washington Post Express shows that the possibility is there. "Lost in Translation" looked at the real dangers facing the unwary consumers who get kanji tattoos. I am not joking when I say “real dangers”. But neither am I referring to unhygenic tattooing practices. What I am talking about is toe-curlingly appalling linguistic blunders. Specifically, I mean kanji combinations like these: - Extremely Military Affairs Stopping
- Crazy Diarrhea
- Weird (tattooed on one B. Spears) Yes, these are phrases that real people (yes, Britney Spears is a real person) actually have had tattooed into their skin. To be honest, I am not entirely surprised at these and other errors. After all, I have seen many reversed images of kanji being offered for tattoos, and kanji jewelry that simply did not mean anything like it was supposed to. One necklace, I remember, had the kanji for “road” on it - although the poor owner had been told it meant love. I guess her love hit the road and didn't come back no more, no more, no more, no more.... As Tian Tang puts it in the Post: "People ask, 'I got the tattoo, can you tell me what this means? And I'm like, 'Why didn't you do this before you got that tattoo?'" Yes, you would think that would be the obvious thing to do – especially if you are getting something permanent like a kanji tattoo. So how can you make sure you don’t end up a national laughingstock? First of all, make sure you know something about the Japanese language. Check out the copious information at sites like japanese.about.com and in five minutes you will know more about kanji, hiragana and katakana than most of the people already walking around with it tattooed into their skin. Next, remember that there is often no such thing as an exact translation. Basic nouns are one thing – a table is a table is a table, after all. But abstract concepts, like Semper Fidelis (the motto of the US Marine Corps), can be notoriously difficult to translate well. Once you have grasped this background material, you are ready to meet with the tattoo artist. That’s right – meet. Don’t get anything done yet. At first you just want to talk. Specifically, you want to find out how familiar he or she is with the issues mentioned above. If after an hour or so on the internet you know more about Japanese than your tattoo artist, then you need to be very careful about kanji she suggests. So what can you do if your tattoo artist doesn’t know his kanji from his katakana? How do you go about getting the kanji yourself? Well if you are confident in your new-found kanji knowledge, then there are a number of online dictionaries such as this one http://kanjidict.stc.cx/dict that can help. Otherwise I would recommend getting a translation from a site like the one I run - http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/ . A good translator will be able to offer you a number of different options as well as explaining the exact meaning and pronunciation of the different kanji. They should also be able to offer you a number of different styles, from basic kanji calligraphy fonts to genuine Japanese shodo calligraphy. At the end of the day, how you decide to go about getting your kanji tattoo is up to you. Just remember that preparation is the key to making sure your kanji tattoo doesn’t get “Lost in Translation”. About the Author Stephen Munday lives in Japan and is the creator of http://www.japanese-name-translation.com, where you can download images of over 2,200 names in kanji or have a unique phrase translated into Japanese for a tattoo. This article is © Stephen Munday 2005. Permission is given to reproduce this article with the URLs correctly hyperlinked. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
Return to Index
email this
page
Still haven't found what you are
looking for?
Try this search:
Free Email
List Reveals health,
fitness and wellness
tips - secrets and information - delivered directly to
your inbox
How to Benefit from the Mind-Body Connection
(excerpt)
You are about to gain insight into the
mind-body connection. The number of
people who truly understand these principles on our
planet are relatively few.
There is an undeniable connection between our minds and
bodies, you can learn
to use this fact to your benefit.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine and
Miracles" was once a
distraught cancer surgeon until he
began to understand the greater principles
of the mind-
body connection. He felt dragged down by the artificial
barriers
that existed between patient and doctor, and the
helplessness he often felt as
a result of his inability
to effectively serve those patients. Eventually, those
barriers
were disintegrated by Dr. Siegel's recognition
and growing understanding of the
mind-body connection and
how it could serve his patients and himself.
Dr. Siegel, or Bernie as he began to have his patients
refer to him, had some
startling realizations as a cancer surgeon. He found that
there were actually
quite a few people in the world that successfully beat
the statistics on cancer
survival. He began to recognize that a patient's ability
to defeat something as
serious as cancer had to do with the patient's mind and
attitude about their
disease.
If you would like to see the rest of
this article, please go here:
http://www.tobeinformed.com/repository/mind-body.html
copyright 2004 - David Snape
|