Cards insult Japanese

Press, 21 August 1984, Page 31

Cards insult Japanese

From

BRUCE ROSCOE

in Tokyo The New Zealand Government is suffering from an identity crisis in Japan. This time, it is not prickly trade requests for the freeing of beef and butter imports that are causing communications to break down. Some New Zealand Government officials appear incapable of communicating to their Japanese counterparts information that is much simpler. And more important. New Zealand officials are not correctly telling highlevel Japanese diplomats and top business leaders who they are. Or what they do, and who they work for. In Japan, no breach of personal protocol could be as great. In many cases the namecards they present to Japanese leaders carry Japanese translations that are so wrong the errors are sadly funny. The private laughter the childish translations provoke among Japanese is at New Zealanders, not with them. It also provokes a little disgust. The namecard is the universally accepted business passport in Japan. No one takes it lightly. Its presentation and ac-

ceptance is a minor ritual, it is scrutinised with a trained eye for the personal particulars that tell a Japanese how to handle a new acquaintance. Ambiguity over such detail puts Japanese ill at ease. Only linguistic chauvinists or cultural imperalists believe correct English is sufficient to communicate with hosts of a non-English speaking people. Although Japan has become New Zealand’s top buisness partner, no New Zealand Government departments have decided what to call themselves in Japanese, excepting Foreign Affairs and Trade and Industry whose officials are regularly posted at the New Zealand Embassy in Tokyo. Some officials of those two departments study Japanese for two years at the United States State Department school in Yokohama, but their expertise in the language is used only within their own departments. One result is that when officials of other departments prepare to visit Japan for negotiations, research, or introductions to prospective clients for New Zealand companies, the translation work for their namecards and other docu-

ments is fielded out to unskilful New Zealand companies that play word guessing games in which the recipient of the translation loses. Some of the worst mistakes in translation are seen on the namecards of visitors from the Department of Scientific ana Industrial Research. Several D.SJ.R. food scientists have mistranslated job titles, which, if they worked in railways, would make a locomotive’ engineer sound like a toy train driver. On some namecards “division of horticulture and processing” curiously reads in crippled Japanese, “division of horticultural disposal analysis.” A Horticultural Research Unit research officer’s Japanese title vulgarly suggests he works in a sales department. That may be closer to the truth, but for semi-Government officials visiting Japan it is wiser to stress engagement in research. Worse than the mistakes in job title in the case of the D.S.I.R. is the fact that D.S.I.R. officials are calling their department different names in Japanese. One D.S.I.R. scientist’s card says he is from the

“New Zealand natural science and industrial research agency,” another drops “New Zealand” from the name, while another defines the department as the “ministry of science and industrial research.” All Japanese Government ministries and agencies and major business companies have official English titles for themselves and their personnel The titles may correspond to nothing in a foreign country, but there is no reason why they should, because the institutions they describe are Japanese. As communications between the New Zealand and Japanese Governments increase, the danger of misunderstanding, or an assumption of disrespect for another’s language, will grow unless New Zealand Government departments that deal with Japan sort out what they are, and publish directories in Japanese out of at least courtesy. It is the type of project that could be competently supervised by New Zealand shcolarship graduates of Japanese universities who are consistently declined employment by New Zealand Government departments and big companies on the interesting pretext that their skills are not needed.