01 November 2012

Zombie + "seminar"

Whoops, sorry I was a zombie on Nov. 1 and had no posts about food then. Zombie? I had a presentation to do at 9:30am on Nov. 1, and I had to work on it until around 5am -- or 4.5 hours before! I finally slept at 6am, thankfully I woke up at 9am so I got a good 3 hours sleep, and well I got to the venue just in time.

Whenever there are any kind of presentations here made to an audience of professors and students, they call them a "seminar" / seminaa / セミナー, by the way. But in no way are these things seminars in my understanding of the word, and it's more of us students and researchers presenting the work we've done in front of the professors and fellow students and researchers for their comments. While particularly in the academe or even in the medical field, many people understand English, obviously it's not the same kind of English that we might know from the places where we came from. I've told you before about their use of "campaign" instead of "promo," or deals. "Seminar" I guess is another one. And then there's "typhoon" -- they refer to all tropical cyclones as typhoons, whereas in the English-speaking world, a typhoon is only one type of tropical cyclone that is of a certain strength. That is because "typhoon" is some what directly coming from taifuu / 台風 / typhoon. Some non-Japanese I met here call certain sandwiches as "burger" only because those sandwiches use buns the same as those for hamburgers. They say "go back" instead of "go home" -- now that is because that would be the exact translation when they mean to say "go home" in Japanese. In the Philippines, the words "traffic" and "salvage" stand for something a little different from their original meanings. And there are many more examples here in Japan and in each and every country where English is spoken. You got some?

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