My in-laws – who were actually native Chinese speakers and could speak Thai only with difficulty – could not pronounce my name at all. My first name is a very common one in the US. It is NOT Jim, but it is about as common and as short. Let’s pretend it is Jim. My in-laws’ native language does not start syllables with the J sound or end them with the M sound, so my “simple” name was utterly unpronounceable. (NOTE: Their language actually does start and stop syllables with J and M, I’m just substituting for my letters.) Instead, they called me “Lohng,” which they assured me had a good meaning.
Is it … is it “Sam” by any chance? 
Carol, is there any truth to the rumour that Asians like to label their products in English, so as to project an image of class and elegance?
I remember working in a Canadian brewery warehouse, where we took back empties, and they came in every kind of box, case, you name it, we got it.
I still remember a case that came back, with the brand written in Korean. Of course, I could not read the Korean characters, but in elegant copperplate calligraphed script, it said this in English:
“Let the Crown Dry welcome you into the new world of smoothness and coolness with its taste. Enjoy your happy life with the Crown Dry.”
This got a lot of laughs from the guys on the floor. “We have a happy life if we drink this stuff? Seriously?”
Carol, is there any truth to the rumour that putting English on an Asian product makes it more desirable to Asians? No matter how badly worded or ungrammatical?
If an American asked someone out for coffee, would he (or she) complain about hearing, “I would love to! But I have to go home and floss my cat” [mutatis mutandis] instead of, “In your dreams, pig.”
Funny story from when I was a tween in SoCal. Our uncommon family name is a little weird both in spelling and in sound. Even gringos want to mis-hear it and substitute both vowel and consonant sounds before trying in vain to spell that mangled version.
One day we show up at some random restaurant and Dad gives our name to the greeter for the wait list. The swarthy 30-something man replied with a thick Euro-somewhere accent (Greek, Romanian, Hungarian? Hell I was 12; I have no idea). “You fox!”. Dad, not understanding, repeats our name. Guy says “You Fox. I call ‘Fox’ when table ready!” Dad gets it this time. Our code name is “Fox”.
Dad used “Fox” as his name in restaurants for the remaining 30+ years of his life. I still use it occasionally myself if I 'm feeling mischievous.
“Cartwright?!”
I enjoy the comedy of Knoxville-born comedian Henry Cho, whose parents were Korean. He has a bit where his father, in a restaurant, keeps pronouncing “quiche” as “quickie”.
I’m not sure what it is like everywhere. The situation is different in different countries - for example, anything being marketed to Singaporeans should be marked in English because that’s one of the official languages, and while there are plenty of speakers of Mandarin, Malay, etc., English is the one language that pretty much everyone will understand.
As to Indonesia, I suppose there could be some cachet attached to English on products for sale, just as French on American products could be intended to add an air of sophistication. But it could also simply be a practical choice. If a product will be sold both in and out of Indonesia, it makes sense to label it for both local and international consumption.
And there is status attached to the idea that something will be sold abroad. One thing that puzzled me when I first moved to Indonesia was how many were marked “export quality.” It was a while before I realized that the best quality of many products were saved for selling abroad - coffee being a good example. (This possibly being due to what people would buy abroad, but also in some cases there were Indonesian or international standards regarding what was allowed to be sold in other countries.) So saying something was “export quality” meant it was guaranteed to be good.
On the other hand, Indonesia passed a law while I was living in Jakarta that all products sold in Indonesia had to be labeled in Indonesian. This was a terrifying prospect for us pampered expats, as we regularly consumed grocery items from Australia and elsewhere that were only labeled in English. The fear, not unfounded as it turned out, was that the Indonesian market was too small for a lot of producers and the cost of the revised packaging would cause them to stop exporting to us.
In the end, most Australian products that I cared about buying adjusted to the new law. But it was annoying as they would often take a product already adequately packaged and simply add another layer of packaging, this time all in Indonesian. It drove me crazy from an environmental perspective (twice as much waste) and convenience (twice as long to open things up).
Absolutely - you understand perfectly. The “no” was there in Micronesia. Foreigners simply needed to learn how to hear it, since the cultural norms guiding interactions were different.
I want people to be daunted by my name until they get used to it and it’s no longer daunting. If I don’t make them use it, it will always be daunting.
Well I can say it’s true in China still.
Products intended to be fancy and/or targeting young people often include some English. And it’s common for that English to be gibberish – to contain spelling / grammatical errors, or just be obvious placeholder text like “Lorem Ipsum”.
Just today I was looking at a NASA jacket I liked the look of. The front was nice and minimalist with just the NASA logo, but unfortunately the back had, in a large font: “Multiucltrue: a smile is the most charmino part of a persgn forever”
In fairness, we do the same with Chinese or Kanji characters in the West (use characters that look cool with little thought to their meaning), though it’s less common than the other way round.
Beauty.
Not quite the same thing but close. …
Back in the day my brother was a US Navy Officer stationed aboard a ship homeported out of Subic Bay Philippines. Lots of locally made supplies and matériel of all sorts came aboard. One prominent category of goods was custom logo merch. Every ship and every major unit would have to have their individual motto-ized, logo-ized customized coffee cup, wind breaker, jogging shorts, “Congratulations for a tour well-served” certificate, etc., etc., etc. The amount of that kind of stuff a military organization has would boggle most civilians.
Anyhow, of course it was all locally sourced from small shops that could embroider, or screen print, or whatever the appropriate pictures and text onto whatever substrate. A job they did all the time for unit after unit.
The punchline is that in his entire several years there not a single order ever came back without a screwup. The “123th Attack Sqaudron” was a classic. Or cups with the logo upside down. Even those including faces and trees and such where you don’t need to read the words to know it’s wrong.
The Navy’s standard saying about this:
The Phillippines: the land of Almost Right.
And it’s not like there weren’t a heck of a lot of Filipinos who spoke a reasonable brand of English. But “Almost Right” was as good as it ever got. It wasn’t horrific like your “NASA” windbreaker. But it wasn’t right either.
The thing is, the windbreaker example was what came to mind because I’d just seen it a few hours ago. It’s hardly the worst I’ve seen, in fact it’s pretty average.
I would like to say though, that it’s not my intention to make fun of this kind of thing.
I’ve found three items of clothing that I bought in the UK or US with Chinese characters, that I subsequently found out have gibberish on them. If no-one around you knows the meaning, it doesn’t matter.
Making errors on clothing for a specific contract though is a different story.
I’m not Carol, but I’ll offer up my 2 cents (2 yuan?) for what it’s worth:
I remember that 20+ years ago in Taiwan, having English or French or other European stuff on products did apparently seem to make it more appealing in Taiwan (people would wear T-shirts with English that didn’t even make sense), but nowadays the shine and novelty has apparently pretty much worn off - people are not as fascinated by America/Europe anymore. And nowadays the English fluency has increased to the point where people often won’t dare wear something nonsensical in English because others can read it (at least, I think that’s what’s going on).
It may or may not be.
I don’t know what the history was in Indonesia, but in Australia it derived from post-war Britain, where, to help pay off war-debt, stuff was being shipped out that was not for sale locally. Rationing ended in 1954, but stuff still used that “export quality” marketing term in the 1970s.
It’s valuable to realize that this isn’t true of ‘asia’. It’s true of some parts of asia, more true or more foreign in some parts of asia. As is the case of Britain: the Scots traditionally thought the English were liars, and I can see their point: I know people from that culture who think that telling the literal truth is indescribably boorish, indicating that you haven’t got the manners to make up a white lie.
I want that jacket!
There was surprisingly little of that in Indonesia. Probably because rather than invent “English” gibberish, they just ripped off real stuff from the West, so it tended to be correct.
Not quite the same thing, but this discussion reminds me of the way Carr’s Table Water Crackers used to be labeled in Indonesia. It seems that the inside flap of the box was always used to identify what part of the world the product was being shipped to. For a time, the stuff that went to Indonesia just said “Rest of World.”
I thought that was sheer poetry, and kept a Rest of World flap on my refrigerator. Alas, it disappeared one day - it probably fell off and got swept up or wedged under the fridge. By then, the boxes no longer said “Rest of World” so I don’t have that any more. (I do have some Darkie toothpaste and some Darlie toothpaste though, so there’s that.)
I saw a T-shirt that said “History is a strange disease”. Not sure if it was uber-philosophical or some sweatshort worker pulling English words at random.
How silly. The UK has a similar law, and the Polish products I buy just have a sticker with the description and nutritional information in English. Cheap, simple and less waste.
That’s great. Almost, but not quite nonsense.
I’m reminded of an old Zippy the Pinhead comic where he he intones “Zombies rule Belgium” and the headline reads “If you can’t say something nice, say something surrealistic.”
Which is usually misquoted in these later days as:
If you can’t say something nice, say something surreal.