Multilingual Airplane Announcements

I’m writing this on the plane back to Tokyo. I have always been interested in the way that announcements on many flights, especially in Asia and Europe are given in multiple languages. Some of them, such as the pilot’s post-take-off babbling speech, has to be interpreted on the fly by the flight attendants. The imperfections that result from such interpreting and the differing strategies in interpretation that sometimes result are something I love to tune into when I’m lucky enough to understand more than one version. On this flight, the American pilot had his speech translated into Chinese and Japanese which is a lucky combo of languages for me…

I can’t remember some of the fun things I have noticed on other Taiwan and China flights to/from Japan but I’ll mention a few from today’s flight. The American pilot, with a heavy southern accent, spoke in babbling half-sentences. He said we would probably land early, but implied we might still disembark the aircraft on-time or perhaps late because we had to “negotiate” our way to the gate. After explaining this he said, “We are supposed to arrive at 14:05…” with the “…” in the intonation of his sentence implying that he really wasn’t sure. He then commented on the remnants of a typhoon in Tokyo, the weather there, and the usual collection of incredibly important details like what altitude we are going to fly at now, after 150 miles, and explained his cunning strategies for avoiding turbulence.

The Chinese and Japanese translations both cut some of the crap and the Japanese translation added, as always, a hefty collection of honorific phrases that contrasted beautifully with the extremely casual tone of the pilot. While the Japanese translation was fairly loyal to the original in terms of reference info, the Chinese flight attendant didn’t hesitate to correct the pilot on one or two of the details (like the current time in Tokyo) and both translations picked up on the pilot’s barely noticeable hint that there was a time difference between Taiwan and Japan and explicitly referred to this with extra details. The Japanese translation didn’t include any of the subtlety of the American’s pilot’s reference to arriving early but perhaps disembarking late and simply said that we are expected to arrive at 14:05. The Chinese translation, though I wish I could remember the exact phrasing, went all out. After saying that we were supposed to arrive at 14:05, the flight attendant managed to give us the impression of, “who knows when we will really get there?”