Sorry for the meiwaku

ご迷惑をおかけして誠に申し訳ございません

The very first thing you learn in Japanese bureaucrat school is to always, always refer to the 迷惑 (meiwaku) you caused when apologizing for your product killing someone or a financial scandal which destroys the company.

The very first thing you learn in Japanese translation school is to always, always use the word “trouble” to translate meiwaku.

Let’s say your creative director for the Olympics is found to have made crude jokes about the Holocaust in the past. So you fire him of course. At the time, Seiko Hashimoto, President of the Olympic Organizing Committee, made this statement:

ただ、明日の開会式と、大会が終わるまでは、ご迷惑をおかけしないためにも、やり通さないといけないと思っています

And here is the translation of this statement made by a New York Times reporter, in a tweet to her 50K followers:

I’ll have to make sure first of all to establish a structure of operations so that we will never trouble any more people.

But making light of the Holocaust is not a matter of merely troubling people, nor did Hashimoto think it was. What she meant, and what the translation should have said, is that she wants to avoid further distress and disruption. That’s what meiwaku means in this case.

(Beyond meiwaku, one has to really wonder where on earth the NYT gets its translations, whether or not it checks them, and if so how. This particular translation goes well past just horrible. Half of it is just made up and the other half is wrong. First of all, there’s no “first of all” in the Japanese. The entire “structure of operations” part is pure invention, and has nothing to do with やり通さない/yari-toosanai, which means “see through (to the end)”, which is clear from the reference in the Japanese to the next day’s opening ceremony and the end of the games. The translator also entirely missed the nuance in ためにも/tame ni mo, which we could write another post about; suffice it to say that in this case it conveys “if only to”. Perhaps this is an example of a translator translating what she *thinks* the text *must* mean—in the West the assumption would be that to solve a problem someone is setting up new structures or rules.)

But wait. Isn’t it the case that meiwaku can in fact just mean “bother” or “inconvenience”, like a kid listening to loud music next to you in the subway car? Yes, it can. Although that, it turns out, is a rather recent usage, dating back to Meiji. “Distress and disruption”, the senses being used by company officials apologizing for the company going bankrupt, or Hashimoto above, is the original meaning, going back five hundred years. Originally, it was a word used in Buddhism and philosophy, where it meant to lose one’s way or be at a loss.

Feeling creative? Instead of meiwaku, use shinpai! Let’s say one of your company’s ships gets stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, paralyzing 10% of world trade and causing billions of dollars in damage. Here the company (昭栄汽船, Sho-ei Kisen) chose to go with shinpai (see here):

本船の事故にともない、スエズ運河を航行中、航行予定の船舶、並びにその関係者の皆様に多大なご心配をお掛けしておりますこと誠に申し訳ございません。

But lo and behold, it turns out in English that this was a harmless sounding “worry” (this from USA Today):

We sincerely apologise for causing a great deal of worry to ships in the Suez Canal and those planning to go through the canal.

Asahi Shimbun, which should know better, went with “tremendous worry”. By the way, how can you “cause worry” to a vessel?

In defense of these translators, it is true that shinpai today is often used for something relatively minor and thus can in fact sometimes be translated as “worry” or “concern”. However, shinpai actually has a broader range of meanings than “worry”. It can extend to “troubled” and from there to uneasy, anxious, afraid, uneasy, and even distressed and disturbed. It is in one of those stronger senses, presumably, that the shipping company had on mind when they ofused the word shinpai; plus, they added 多大/tadai/immense.

It turns out that there was nothing at all wrong in the shipping company’s use of shinpai. It was simply translated badly. It should have been:

We are extremely sorry that the incident with our ship is causing such immense distress and disruption to the ships transiting or planning to transit through the Suez Canal and their stakeholders.

By the way, although shinpai can be used for issues internal to oneself, like worrying about getting fired, originally it had the meaning of worrying about other people. It is actually derived from 心配り/kokoro-kubari/“consideration of others”. The word shinpai is a reverse-engineered word (和製漢語/made-in-Japan Chinese) based on the Chinese readings of this originally Japanese word. (There are more words like this than you might imagine.) Shinpai wo kakeru, as commonly used in apologies and seen here, refers to causing shinpai to someone else. (We’ll have to deal with 掛ける/kakeru another time.)