> "Criticism of Murkon". Eh?
>

I traced what happens to "refuge" under this process. It gets translated to a Japanese noun (pronounced "hinan") meaning "criticism; accuse; blame", the two kanji of which are best summarized in meaning as "not" and "difficulty; distress". You can't always discern the meaning of a word from its individual kanji, as can be seen in this case.

How did the error happen, then? It turns out there's a different word, a word also pronounced "hinan" which has a different first kanji, meaning "avoid". Put the "avoid" kanji together with the "difficulty; distress" kanji and you get a word meaning "evacuation; refuge".

So the error in the double translation process was in incorrectly translating from English to Japanese. The second half of the process, translating from Japanese back to English, gets the wrong English word because of the error of the first part.

Can we really call it "Engrish" in this case, then? I thought that's the term for the Japanese mangling the English language, where in this case it's quite the opposite which causes the trouble. Since I just picked one example to trace through at random, I don't know how many of the translation errors occurred going one way and how many occurred going the other way, but it's probably a mixture of considerable amounts of both.

On that note, is there a term analogous to "Engrish" for English-speaking people fumbling around trying to write Japanese? Not that it'd be all that common...