On Monday, January 7, 2002, at 10:46  PM, Bob Schroeck wrote:

Michael Noakes wrote:

Incidentally, I thought I heard that print club machines had finally 
made it
over into the States.  Not true?

True.  Just saw four of them last night in Edgewater, NJ.

Of course, I was at the Mitsuwa Asian shopping center...  but they 
*were* in
the US.

Seriously, I have seen them elsewhere, in less culturally-specific
surroundings; most notably the Jersey Shore.

The point is not whether they exist in the States; the discussion is 
about what to call them. Do they actually have signs on them calling 
them "print clubs"? Or do they have signs saying something more 
descriptive and appropriate like "photo sticker booth"?

I'd still advise against using the term "print clubs" in a fanfic unless 
the term is, in fact, actually being used in an English-speaking 
environment like the Jersey Shore. The concept of a booth where you get 
your picture taken and it comes out on a souvenir sticker is a simple 
one, and I see no reason why it shouldn't catch on in the 
States--someone's bound to see it as a money-maker--but I sincerely 
doubt they'd call them "print club" machines.

Even if the term is introduced in an earlier chapter in a context where 
the meaning is quite plain, I think using a more natural-sounding 
English term or just straight "purikura" would be a better choice. I 
don't think "print clubs" is a term that has any forseeable future in 
the English language. If it were popularized in a marketing blitz and 
became something every American child trafficked in with their friends 
at school, then we wouldn't further bat an eye at the marginal 
appropriateness of the term. Perhaps "print clubs" sounds like a natural 
description of the phenomenon to someone who lives in Japan, but to me 
it sounds just like another one of those bad-English terms.

But maybe those machines in Jersey actually say "Print Clubs" on them. 
I'd see that as very strange and a poor lexical choice, but if they want 
to start popularizing this nealogism and it actually starts catching on, 
there's no reason you shouldn't use it in your writing.

This is part of a larger issue about foreign vocabulary in 
English-language fiction. I'm not opposed to a certain amount of it, 
where the significance can't be easier expressed by a straight 
translation (such as in the case of -san, -chan, etc.), but using a term 
just for the heck of it is never good (can anyone give a good reason why 
the term "minna" should ever appear in a fanfic instead of the word 
"everyone"? I think people who use this do so just because it's one of 
the few words they can recognize listening to their anime...). The 
problem is complicated by pseudo-English terms like "print clubs"--terms 
invented in Japan by the Japanese for the Japanese, but which are based 
on maybe-appropriate/maybe-not-appropriate English words. "Print clubs" 
and other such terms may sound like English words, but they're not part 
of an English vocabulary, and maybe they shouldn't be.

Peter


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