The GITS Blog

A google for "lecture meeting" turns up over 57,000 hits, nearly all of them from Japanese sites. As far as I checked, the few that aren't from Japanese sites are in different context, such as Lecture: Meeting Global Commitments on Oceans.

"Lecture meeting" is almost always a "translation" for the Japanese 講演会 (kouenkai), which means seminar/workshop/talk etc. Why is this term, which is almost (?) never seen in authentic English, so often used as a translation for kouenkai?

I submit that this is an example of cargo cult translation. Some ink-stained wretch toiling on a translation in the dim past came across the term 講演会, and not knowing much English, decided to coin his own term to translate it: lecture meeting (a literal translation of kouen — lecture — and kai — meeting). Succeeding generations of translators, themselves unburdened by an excess of sensitivity for or knowledge of their target language, came across the gloss and plopped it into their own translations, and like Wikipedia, the more the gloss was referenced, the more authority it gained. Indeed, "lecture meeting" is the only gloss offered for kouenkai in the venerable and much revered Green Goddess.

Like a cargo cult, glosses like these accrete in dictionaries and references, compiled and used by people who follow the form of translation without much idea of what translation actually (or at least ideally) entails.