Japanese
What are some pitfalls specific to Japanese to avoid that a client should be aware of when translating into this language?
- For marketing purposes, clients should be aware that:
a. Japanese are more oriented to sensibility than to logical explanations based on features and figures. You can see this clearly in Japanese commercials. For example, a well-known commercial for a newspaper subscription shows a big cow in front of a house and residents of the house come out to say, “I wish he were a human.” No connection between the cow and newspaper is given. This commercial was a huge success leading to higher sales of the newspaper.
b. In marketing IT in Japan, I have found American vendors often list a lot of features in their ads, while Japanese IT vendors (like NEC) tend to use Japanese celebrities and often have them playing with (or simply holding) computers without any explanation of features.
c. Japanese are not verbose. Silence (space) is often a virtue.
For marketing, direct translation should never be used. Clients should use a translator with copy-writing experience or have translated text be edited by a copywriter.
- For legal documents, however, everything should be translated word by word, but Japanese legal documents are probably 65 percent more succinct than English legal documents.
- It’s a basic thing, but be sure to convert weights and measures (into the metric system).
What are characteristics of Japanese that are unique or different from English and/or other languages?
- Subjects are often omitted. One has to guess with context.
- Singular and plural do not exist.
- Verbs always come at the end of a sentence, which requires higher skill for simultaneous interpreting. (The same applies to German, Korean, and some other languages.)
- The present progressive form can be both past and present.
How do these characteristics make it important to use properly qualified, professional translators?
A good translation into Japanese should always sound as if a native Japanese in the industry wrote the text to start with. Therefore, in good Japanese translation (although with some exceptions like legal documents), the subjects are properly skipped, singular/plural are ignored, and even redundant adjectives should be cut into shorter descriptions. That is why I do not believe in the significance of back translation. A translation which sounds good in back translation often means the Japanese is not good.
Relate an example or two of times you found a website page or form difficult to use because it was poorly localized. How might a business lose money, prestige, or incur legal risk due to this bad translation?
Machine-translated websites are obviously useless.
I often get a kick out of a medical package insert translated into Japanese for a Chinese audience. A Chinese person must have translated it, but they often use Chinese characters instead of Japanese characters, and it’s soooo funny! I occasionally see similar things on the Web.
Translations on the Adobe and Microsoft sites used to be bad. Now they’ve improved a lot.
If possible, provide one example of a particular phrase or concept that only a properly qualified, professional translator would be able to correctly communicate.
This is more like the importance of using a proper copy-writing translator.
One example of a good translation job is “Intel Inside,” which became “Intel Haitteru” for the Japanese. The meaning remains “Intel inside” as in the original, but it has beautiful rhyme (“in-te-ru/hait-te-ru”), which made the translated phrase as popular as the original.
