Baskin and Ravins 31

Here, I post about how Koreans or Asians might be embarrassed at their poor use of the English language.  However, when I think about it, I should consider it HUGE “business opportunities” that non-English speakers don’t use the language appropriately.  My housemate reminded me that it’s “job security” for her and her boyfriend which is so write (ha, ha…I know it’s “right”).

What sparked this post was their viewing of a few facebook pages (one is I believe a Facebook Twit & the other an actual group).  If you have a facebook account, I think you can access this “Engrish Twit.”  Currently, this page/twit has 8,680 fans as of today (July 1, 2009).  Another page called “Engrish” is basically promoting a website at www.engrish.com (and I guess now I’m promoting it too ^^) is here on Facebook.  There’s 394 members of this group.

Here’s some other entertaining photos:

I thought this meant no "Snorkeling"

Just funny...

Wordpress.com – the makers of the software of this website and many like it has a list of the “Blogs of the Day” and in particular, they keep track of the “Top Blogs” or the websites that use their software and generate, I believe, the most traffic.  In the list includes websites/blogs like: CNN’s Political Ticker & The CNN Wire, People Magazine’s “Celebrity Baby Blog” and POPSEOUL! A little down the list, but still generating quite a bit of traffic (over a 150,000 unique visitors a month, to be exact according to Compete.com) is a website called: Engrish Funny.  It purports to be a website which provides it’s readers/visitors  ”Engrish Pictures and other Funny Engrish Mistakes in English from around the world.”

So, if there was a website that showed pictures of Koreans being stupid somewhere, wouldn’t Koreans possibly protest the website & create a huge fuss like they did with the U.S. beef imports just a short while ago?  What if Japanese or Chinese people were constantly photographed and incredibly embarrassing pictures of them doing stupid things was tracked by some website?  How would these two economic powerhouses react?

Well, since I’m in Korea, I’m going to share some of the poor examples of English use provided by this website:

• What should of been “Marinated Rapeseed” was advertised as “Marinated Rape” (pretty embarrassing)
• The advertising company that did this should of been fired.  The sad thing is that I’ve seen this mistake made by another advertisement in my neighborhood for another relatively high paying business.  Kind of sad…
• Probably a government agency not wanting to pay a cheap English teacher to help them…

Anyway, these errors, websites like these and just in general my desire to make Korea and if possible later, the rest of Asia, look better in the world is why I built this little company.  The children and future generations of these countries don’t deserve to be continually embarrassed or the countries could improve if they just added a bit more in terms of editing staff & got off their high horses.

Real English Consulting will help make sure these mistakes are no longer Engrish Funny, but “Impressive English by the Koreans.”