OO9

Japan is well known for taking existing things, changing them, and making them better.

Unfortunately not every thing they change is a change for the better.

For example,外来語　gairaigo or loan words. These are words that are foreign based and usually written in katakana.

A simple one would be テストtesuto, or test. Very little change has been made from the original meaning of the word.

Where everybody gets into trouble is when Japanese people take a seemingly English word and start changing the meaning.

A word that became popular recently is アイドリングストップ aidoringustoppu or idling stop. This is essentially a term which describes parking your car with the engine on, and sitting inside with the ac/heat cranked and watching tv in your car, rampant in Japan where houses are not much bigger than some cars with no central heating.

Some words that are quite popular among my coworkers right now are フォロー(forou, follow) and プラスアルファ (purasu arufa, plus alpha)

they usually use 'follow' as a verb. For example if I ask someone if a press release is ready, they will 'follow' and contact the appropriate person for me to see if the release is ready or not.

Plus alpha, although not immediately obvious when used in context, means an addition of a unnamed variable of an unassigned amount. The person who runs our weekly departmental meetings said it in a meeting yesterday. I've heard it used so many times, that I just didn't know exactly what it meant.

Many Japanese people think that gairaigo is interchangable with english (and many ugly foreigners think the opposite is true by putting english words in their speech assuming that the Japanese person will understand what they are saying. . This can be a problem because when written and spoken, gairaigo is much longer than most Japanese words.(for example 試験　shiken is test in Japanese and is only two characters, while テスト　is 3. To accomodate this they often abbreviate gairaigo by using the first two katakana of each word. for example playstation us プレーステーション , but it can be abbreviated to just プレステ　(puresute)

Somewhat similar is company's internal acronymns. Western companies are probably the same, but when a company division has a long name they abbreviate. For example, the R&D lab in Japanese's full name is 先端総合研究所 　but internally it's abbreviated to　先端総研 , which to me at first meant absolutely nothing. Also a translator has to be concerned about the official English title of all these departments. the R&D lab is not simply the R&D lab, you must translate it corrently, otherwise it will really complicate things.