The 2008 American major league baseball (MLB) season has just begun. In order to build interest in Japan for American baseball, the MLB has, once every few years, arranged to have its opening day game played in Japan. This year my beloved Boston Red Sox played the first game of the season there two days ago, against the Oakland Athletics. The game was broadcast live here in Korea. After all the trouble I had last fall trying to watch Boston play, it was really nice to watch a game on TV at a normal evening time.
The free paper The Daily Focus, which I excerpted a cartoon from earlier, had a small article yesterday on the game, which Boston won thanks to the heroics of Boston's star player, Manny Ramirez. The headline reads (more or less, I think) "Boston's Ramirez: 'I'm the cleanup hitter!'"
I reproduce this here not because I think you are all interested in the details of the game, but because there is something of linguistic interest in the photo caption. It says:
보스턴 레드삭스의 매니 라미레스가 연장 10회초에 역전 2루타를 날린 후 세리머니를 하고 있다.
Boston Red Sox' Manny Ramirez celebrating (?) after smashing a clutch double in the top of the 10th inning.
I've put a question mark after 'celebrating' because I'm not sure it's the best word. The Korean is serimeoni 세리머니, which is clearly a borrowing of the English word 'ceremony'. It's typical for Manny Ramirez to make that two-armed pointing gesture after a good performance, but in English the word 'ceremony' would be inappropriate to describe it. I can't find the word in any Korean-English dictionary. If you copy the Korean 세리머니 and paste it into Google image search, you get these results, which mostly show athletes engaged in similar activities.
Can anyone suggest a better English translation of the Korean?
If you look up sports celebrations in English in the google image, they show similar gesturing, posing, and other displays to rejoicew hen a great play is made. so perhaps the word sports "celebration" is correct.
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