Japanese Media Struggles to Translate Trump's “Shithole”

On Thursday, January 11, United States President Donald Trump generated instant controversy when he reportedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador and countries in Africa as “shithole countries.” While many newsrooms in the English-language world debated whether or not to reprint the US president's expletive, journalists working in other languages struggled to properly translate the word “shithole”. Japanese media was no exception.

While many English speakers will immediately grasp the meaning of the term used by the President, for non-English speakers the nuances of the word “shithole” can be hard to grasp. The Oxford Dictionary defines the word as “an extremely dirty, shabby, or otherwise unpleasant place.”

However, some major Japanese media outlets chose to use a direct translation of the word. For example, both the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese daily newspaper, and Jiji, one of the country's main wire services, translated “shithole” as “benjo” (便所), a crude word for “lavatory” that could be translated as “shitter.”

But there seemed to be no consensus in the Japanese media about how to translate the President's vulgarity.

William Mallard, Reuters's Japan bureau chief documented the various translations for “shithole” that appeared in the Japanese media, as well as the Japanese-language editions of overseas media, and his tweet, in turn, sparked a Twitter discussion among other journalists and observers:
Mallard noted that the most common translation he encountered was “night-soil pit”, or “koudame” (肥溜め), a hole long used by Japanese farmers to collect human excrement as fertilizer. Mallard, writing in Japanese, hypothesized this word was used because the word “shit hole”, directly translated into Japanese, would seem to mean a “hole for storing shit”, as farmers once did.

Other commenters questioned translating Trump's description of some Caribbean, Central American and African countries as “night-soil pits” (肥溜め), while other commentators continued to document variations on the word “shithole” in Japanese.