I was eating mochi for lunch when I started wondering how the word mochi managed to enter the English language despite the product being not so well-acquainted among the average native speaker of English. The word itself is completely meaningless to someone without exposure to Japanese or the wider East Asian culinary tradition, a simple transliteration of the Japanese term for "gluttonous rice cake" that has, in some corner of the Western world, symbolize an exotic snack almost exclusively, despite it being around for thousands of years and used in dishes sweet and savory, for proper meals and desserts.
Mochi is not alone in its quiet entering of the lexicon of English and beyond. A slew of Japanese foods like sushi, sashimi, ramen, tempura, among others, have also become familiar with English speakers. But the phenomenon is not simply a display of the global appeal of Japanese food. Foods and words that originate from other languages, such as masala, hummus, and kebab, have become household names without requiring literal translations. Globalization of food has led to a globalization of terms used to talk about food, with a globalized elite not needing extensive translations to explain what used to be truly foreign dishes served in their corner eateries.
But taking a closer look, one would find that the free exchange of foreign terms to be limited, with those that are difficult to pronounce for foreigners not widely used despite the growing popularity of the things they represent. Xiaolongbao and huoguo are still more likely called "soup dumplings" and "hotpot" in English despite the dishes being more fashionable and widely accepted globally. And the prevalence of dishes named "(country)-style (popular Western dish)" only attests to the limits of how flexible the average foreign food connoisseurs can be when it comes to handling terms from faraway places that do not easily roll off the tongue.
Nor is the selective adoption of exotic terms limited to food. Whereas it is common for Chinese and Koreans living in foreign countries to adopt English names as they deem their native names to be too difficult for foreigners to pronounce, it is much less common for Indian and Japanese migrants to do the same, note necessarily because they are prouder of their native names than the average Chinese or Korean, but simply because, from their personal experiences, foreigners can much more easily grasp the approximate pronunciations of their native names.
Of course, the difficult pronunciation is not a problem just for English speakers or Westerners. The prevalence of Westerners who take up Chinese names when they study the Asian language show that English can be just as difficult for non-English speakers to grasp as it is the other way around. Especially in a language like Chinese in which direct transliteration of foreign terms is a relatively rare practice, to get foreign terms to stick naturally as a permanent part of the local tongue is an often impossible task. Indeed, as the use of French or German stock phrases (think rendezvous or schadenfreude) in English suggests, even if foreign terms have been in common use for centuries and are widely understood, they may continue to be perceived as foreign and their spelling and pronunciation butchered by many who are unfamiliar with their languages of origin.
The relative difficulty of terms from some languages to pronounced and adopted wholesale by people of another country illustrate in one way just how globalization is often far from being an even field. Whereas Japanese people and cooks can confidently promoting their dishes and names in foreign countries, knowing that they can be easily adopted by the local peoples without the need to invent new terms and alternative tags of identity, the same cannot be said of people from many other cultures. This discrepancy leads to differing speed of dissemination and adoption of idiosyncratic cultural elements beyond national boundaries.
And the forced adoption of local languages by people from places with difficult-to-pronounce languages also color how cultures from those places are perceived by others. Japanese people using only Japanese terms to spread Japanese culture show the world that Japanese culture is unique and independent of any other. But if a culture requires constant translations into native terms with detailed explanations, it only creates distance with their potential audience, by suggesting that this culture, and all its idiosyncrasies are simply too different from one's own culture and too difficult to grasp, thereby reducing the enthusiasm for adoption.
A difficult-to-pronounce language, unfortunately, cannot easily become an easy-to-pronounce one in a short period of time, but workarounds are available to those who cannot get their linguistic terms to stick on foreign shores. French and German terms are often just as difficult to pronounce for English speakers as Chinese or Korean, but French and German terms managed to enter English because of a long history of cultural, and more importantly, people-to-people interactions. For foreign terms to stick, nothing beats more communication, both through media outlets and face-to-face at a grassroots level. Globalization of human movements is the only way to go.
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