March 11, 2002: I learned quite a lesson today, about the way people communicate in Thailand. I learned about kreng jai (which I would translate as "don't rock the boat") years ago; it promotes harmony sometimes at the expense of getting things done. I've experienced kreng jai here, it resulted in a misunderstanding but no long-lasting hostility. But today I worked at translating a document (an employee status report). It was translated literally by one of the youngest of the group in the office, Surin. Surin's a good kid (he could be my son, by age — so I'm allowed to use this title, I think). His grasp of English grammar is better than mine, he actually corrected me when I called something a "noun clause" — it's actually a noun phrase. Thank you, Surin. Go to your room, Surin. But his functional competency in writing — could use some improvement [and I've just illustrated my own point, by accident — read on].
Surin translated this employee critique, and as we both realized some time later, it was his first time to do it, and my first time to read "raw" translation from Thai. It's not that the translation was inaccurate (it was, in the sense that the words didn't make sense together), but that it accurate in the sense that it conveyed in English, what'd been expressed in Thai. Whoa! Danger, Will Robinson!
In English we have cute phrases like "Get to the point". "Cut to the chase". "Don't beat around the bush". But when "push comes to shove", we call anybody that really does it a "Flamer" (internet jargon for somebody who writes vituperatively without thinking), or, in the case of what I read today, "Unemployed".
Kreng Jai is a common term, a fundamental part of Thai society, and I understand what it implies without knowing what it means literally. I know jai is heart in the emotional sense: jai dii is to have a good heart, jai yen is to have a cool heart (means you don't get upset; it's a compliment), jai ron is to have a hot heart — foreigners are thought to be jai ron (which means they would tend to upset kreng jai...). Anyway khien jai is my pairing of two words — not something I've heard but I think a Thai speaker would get my meaning: to write from the heart. In Western parlance: khien jai = You're fired.
This document was quite strongly worded. I won't go in to the details but if I were to receive it as a US Manager, I would be calling the boss on the phone at night and asking why such a disenchanted employee is still on the payroll.
As we go through the document, which is only two printed pages but we spend close to four hours on it, I question the "severity" of the statements — nay, the accusations. In each case, we agree that the author probably didn't really think all the things that he said, he was just "spouting off". But, Westerners don't spout off in documents like this. I found myself revising the overall tone of the document, translating Thai-English to English. It's an odd place to be as a Reviewer, you're looking for errors, not to completely change the overall flavor.
So I learned a really interesting cultural lesson today, manifested in the language: