Authors: Kieran Hanks, Gwyneth Hardy, Destiny Harrell, Ezequiel Roberts
The genre that we chose for our texts was video games, and more specifically we chose Skyrim and Pokemon. Since Skyrim was made by an American company, and Pokemon was made by a Japanese company, we suspected that there would be differences between the two as one was most likely originally written in Japanese while the other may have even been translated, or adapted from an English text. The games are also very stylistically different, with Skyrim being a high fantasy role-playing game and Pokemon still being a role-playing game, but one directed towards younger children. This could also lead to differences in word choices. For analyzing this, we collected passages of text from each webpage, then marked the word choice within the text as either wago, kango, or gairaigo. In counting words, some things to keep in mind are that we put both katakana loan words and English text in the gairaigo category (as there were very few), and omitted all auxiliary verbs and particles in counting wago.
In the Skyrim text, we noticed a considerably lower ratio of gairaigo to wago and kango before we got a proper count. One interesting point to note is that this text’s grammatical words are written in kanji, such as 為 for ため and 事 and こと. This decision is likely to contribute to the aesthetic of the passage rather than for a semantic meaning. As Skyrim’s setting takes place in an era taking inspiration for medieval era Europe and earlier, using more kanji contributes to the image of ancient texts. This further contributes to the game’s high fantasy aesthetic while simultaneously trying to draw in an older or more serious audience. Another important thing to note is that although almost half of the unique words used in the passage are wago, the kango used are rather complicated, sometimes resulting in even 3 or 4 character compounds. In addition, kango terms for things that are more likely to be referred to with gairaigo at this point are used such as 吸血鬼 for vampire over the now more common ヴァンパイア. Finally, the only loan words that are used refer to in-game terminology and locations (ex. スカイリム for Skyrim and クエスト for quest) most likely to maintain the text of the original instead of coming up with new words or using already existing Japanese ones. Overall, choices like these contribute to the overall more adult aesthetic and implicitly show that the intended audience for this game is adult through using more kanji and complex words, while still showing the foreignness of the game through usage of loan words.
In the Pokemon text, compared to the Skyrim text, there seemed to be a lot more gairaigo. After counting, though, the graph ended up being almost evenly split between wago, kango, and gairaigo. The decision to use gairaigo for words that already exist in Japanese, such as the word ゲットする rather than the NJ 受ける, is most likely due to a desire to have a hip aesthetic appearance to the game, similar to why Skyrim may have chosen to use kanji for a high fantasy and more mature appearance. Though the text uses a fair amount of kango, they are all relatively simple words with every compound being only 2 kanji at most. This text also uses a lot of exclamation marks, a form of punctuation borrowed from western languages, most likely for the same reason. The use of gairaigo and simple wago and kango could also be to make the game appeal more to children, who are the target audience of the game. The exclamation marks make the tone of the writing more excited and energetic as well.
In summary, compared to what we expected to see differ between these texts, what we actually found was a bit surprising. Our expectations that the Skyrim text, one likely adapted from English, would have a higher ratio of gairaigo to wago and kango, but it was the native Japanese text, the Pokemon text, that actually had a larger proportion of gairaigo. We suspect that this is the case as even though the Skyrim text is for a foreign game, the aesthetic clashes with a large usage of gairaigo, and thus elects to use more kanji and NJ and SJ vocabulary, while despite the Pokemon texts status as a native Japanese text, the audience is younger and thus more “hip” resulting in the usage of more gairaigo and wasei-eigo. We can conclude from this that in certain cases, aesthetic may contribute more to the word choice than whether or not the product itself is foreign or not.