Saabisu, saabisu!

Last time I talked about some phrases that are very concise in Japanese yet have many long and complex potential translations in English, depending on the situation. Another example of words not meshing up neatly across languages is the word okyaku-san (oh-kyak-sahn), which can be rendered in English as guest, customer or passenger depending on if the person is staying in a room, making a purchase or riding on something. In English we draw sharp distinctions between a car, a truck and a van depending on the vehicle’s shape and purpose, yet in Japanese there’ll naturally be different set of words that are arbitrarily differentiated — for example, they use one word for the mathematics learned in elementary school (sansuu) and another for math learned at every other stage of education (suugaku), which always confuses me. If the owner of a restaurant came up and put a glass of iced coffee on the table for you, saying, “This is service,” you might not understand that he’d just given you a drink for free; but in Japan, where the word saabisu has come to mean “something given for free to add extra value for the customer,” you’d figure it out before too long. So now you know what Misato is talking about at the end of every Evangelion episode — “Service, service!”

The English word “service” here usually means something you get for free, a kind of “plus alpha” if you will.