During a recent stay I found the following signboard in a (upperclass) Onsen/hotel:
The text in Japanese says 客室 (kyakushitsu) which means “guest room”. Unfortunately, the English translation says “GUWST ROOM”.
This is very vexing due to the following factors:
1) It’s a dictionary word, not a grammatical problem and can be found in a dictionary.
2) According to the Japanese way, nothing can be decided by a single person. I’m pretty sure there were meetings and comittees who had to decide on an appropriate text. Meaning, no one was aware of this mistake the whole time. I don’t even think there are words containing this particular combination of letters.
It just leaves a kind of bitter aftertaste…
Tags: engrish, failure, japanglish, language problem