The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

[Tom Donahue]

is at http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

It's interesting. People have sent in hundreds of pictures,

mostly seeming to be rearguard protests against the use

of quotation marks for emphasis.

--
Tom Donahue

[John Stroman]

In looking over the most recent posts I find that some appear to be
written by non-native English speakers and others by native English
speakers who considered language arts a waste of time when they were
younger. Unless I overlooked something, I don't see any spelling
variations resulting from Textlish.

It does bring up an interesting issue though. Is there a preferable
way of adding emphasis to written text? Word processed English has
quotation marks, all caps, underline, bold, italics, and font change
as options, and Japanese seems to have an endless assortment of 記号
that can be recruited as needed.When going J>E, many professionals
(depending on customer preference of course) convert the menagerie of
Japanese symbols to a seemingly suitable English counterparts, but
obviously there is no standardization. FWIW, I have one customer based
in Europe that insists on preserving the Japanese symbols or replacing
them with a similar looking image from a font such as Webdings that
will display in European settings.

In any event, the writers of the signs and messages posted on the
website seem to be trying to solve the problem of adding emphasis
without having the proper tools available. I infer this from the
apparently haphazard way the emphasis is applied, often on a different
word or phrase than in normal spoken language.

John Stroman

[Tom Donahue]

John Stroman wrote:

> In any event, the writers of the signs and messages posted on the

> website seem to be trying to solve the problem of adding emphasis

> without having the proper tools available.

Yes, but they did have some. They could have written bigger letters

or drawn a box around the word. 

> It does bring up an interesting issue though. Is there a preferable
> way of adding emphasis to written text?

I usually try to do it with the language alone. If not then a meta

solution, like surrounding the phrase with an h1 or em tag in

HTML. That does require a display framework to read it properly.

The method of adding symbols does have the advantage of

being very robust. They will always be there, no matter how

they are displayed.

--
Tom Donahue

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Nov 25, 2012, at 6:10 AM, John Stroman <stromana...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Tom Donahue <arri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> is at http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
>>
>> It's interesting. People have sent in hundreds of pictures,
>> mostly seeming to be rearguard protests against the use
>> of quotation marks for emphasis.
>>
>

> It does bring up an interesting issue though. Is there a preferable
> way of adding emphasis to written text? Word processed English has
> quotation marks, all caps, underline, bold, italics, and font change
> as options, and Japanese seems to have an endless assortment of 記号
> that can be recruited as needed.When going J>E, many professionals
> (depending on customer preference of course) convert the menagerie of
> Japanese symbols to a seemingly suitable English counterparts, but
> obviously there is no standardization. FWIW, I have one customer based
> in Europe that insists on preserving the Japanese symbols or replacing
> them with a similar looking image from a font such as Webdings that
> will display in European settings.
>

Sometimes I catch flack from my customers for not using quotation marks where they are used in Japanese, but they usually accept my explanation that they are unprofessional in English.

I suppose, however, that you can make the argument that in actual usage, quotation marks appear in English in all cases where they are used in Japanese. As far as I know, for the hundreds of comments I have made about poor writing style, nobody has ever corrected the source text (except kanji errors). As a professional writer, I still have an internal desire to strike the quotes when they do not look professional.

Generally speaking, it seems that style is considered secondary in Japanese as long as the points can be understood, but is there any awareness in Japanese that scare quotes are inappropriate in good writing?

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

[Masako Sato]

Benjamin Barrett さん wrote:

> Generally speaking, it seems that style is considered secondary in Japanese as long as the points can be understood, but is there any awareness in Japanese that scare quotes are inappropriate in good writing?

国語では、次の三つの場合、かぎかっこを使うと教えております。
1 会話文 2 引用 3 その語に注目させたい場合

国語表現の見地からすると、読者に筆者の言わんとするところが正しく伝わるのがよい文章ですから、必要な場合には、ためらわずかぎかっこを使います。

Masako Sato

[Brian Watson]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Masako Sato <msa...@gmail.com> wrote:

国語では、次の三つの場合、かぎかっこを使うと教えております。
     1 会話文  2 引用  3 その語に注目させたい場合

Thank you, Masako, for confirming what I thought.

That said, it is not grammatically or typographically correct to use quotation marks for emphasis in English. Depending on the context, in translation I have used italics, initial caps. boldface, etc., but never underlining (after all, we aren't using typewriters any more).

The only time I have translated Japanese quotation marks into English quotation marks directly was when working on legal documents and was required to be the law office to do so. Every symbol on the page had to appear with a corresponding symbol. Very frustrating.

Brian Watson
+1.604.395.4202 (home office), +1.425.246.7888 (cell), brian-momotaro (skype)

[Benjamin Barrett]

Thank you for that. In fact, my Mac dictionary even says about 鉤括弧, "会話や，特に注意すべき語句を示すのに用いる。"

So when translating between Japanese and English, we have to remember that while English speakers do use scare quotes, it's not professional, and in Japanese, using quotation marks for emphasis is normative usage.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

[Jonathan Michaels]

On Monday, November 26, 2012 10:10:24 AM UTC+9, Benjamin Barrett wrote:

So when translating between Japanese and English, we have to remember that while English speakers do use scare quotes, it's not professional, and in Japanese, using quotation marks for emphasis is normative usage.  

I find that it's also helpful to make the following distinction when thinking and talking about this issue:

Quotation marks aren't really used for emphasis in Japanese.  Or for quotes or speech.  In fact, they're almost never used at all.  Kagi-kakko, however, are used frequently for all three purposes, and that's not "inappropriate" or "poor writing style" that Japanese people simply aren't "aware" of—it's just how kagi-kakko are used in Japanese.

In other words, it helps to think of quotation marks ("", ””, etc.) and kagi-kakko (「」) as different punctuation marks; in many cases, the former are used in English in locations equivalent to where the latter are used in Japanese, but definitely not always.

Also, the appropriateness of scare quotes in any given English writing style could be subject to debate, but there's a big difference between scare quotes and emphasis; in fact, in a way, they're opposite in meaning, which is exactly the dichotomy on which the blog linked to in the OP is based.

Jonathan

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Jonathan Michaels

Mito, Japan