Japanese Translation Service

It seems that Japanese translation services are set to be on an upward trend as the Japanese economy is expected to grow in 2015. The need for Japanese translation services is still predominant as Japan's economy is third only to that of the United States. Leading Japanese companies, such as Sony, Toshiba, Canon, Minolta, Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi that have infiltrated the world market in the past, continue to engage in Japanese translation services.

These Japanese translation services are not related to English languages only. They include Japanese translation services that can originate from non-English languages and translated into Japanese or vice versa. Hence, these days it is quite normal for Japanese translation services to involve non-English languages, such as Mandarin, Arabic, Bahasa Malaysia, etc .

As the need for Japanese translation services grow, so would the number of Japanese translation services providers. Therefore, it is important that we understand the unique issues involved with translations, in particular, into Japanese so that we can take them into account when hiring a Japanese translation services provider.

When engaging a Japanese translation services provider from English to Japanese translation, it is important to hire a native Japanese translation services provider. Why is it that important?

Firstly, the Japanese reflects their social hierarchy and cultural sensitivities in their written language. For example, the Japanese translation services provider would have to attach some kind of respect to certain persons and objects in the form honorific characters in front of their related characters. The type of honorific characters to be chosen as prefix by the Japanese translation services provider would also depend on the origin of the word. For example, if the origin is from Japan, then お(o) is supposed to be used by the Japanese translation services provider, while ご(go) is usually used if the word is from China.

Secondly, there are many minute and detailed differences in the Japanese vocabularies and verbs that require the Japanese translation services provider to be exacting in his translations, otherwise he or she may end up conveying different messages.

For example, under vocabularies, the Japanese translation services provider would need to use different terms to differentiate a cow or bull. For the female cow, it is called雌牛 (meushi), the male ox is called 雄牛 (oushi ), the young cow or bull is called 子牛 (koushi) and the parent cow or bull is called 親牛 (oyaushi).

With regards to Japanese sentence construction, the Japanese translation services provider would need to use the exact Japanese verbs to express the subjective view, feelings and intentions of the speaker. For example, the Japanese translation services provider should know the slight difference between the conjugation of the same verbs in the 2 sentences, 雨が降る。and雨が降るかしら。which gives rise to entirely different meanings. The former simply means “The rain falls.” while the latter means “I wonder if it will rain.”

Very often, there are many rules as well exceptions in the Japanese language that requires the Japanese translation services provider to dedicate a team of translator as well as proofreader to translate very important documents, such as legal contracts. That is why it is important to consider engaging professional global translation company as Japanese translation services provider as it would most likely have a larger pool of Japanese translators, proofreaders and editors.

In my next article, I hope to share more examples of the uniqueness of the Japanese language which can only be fully understood by a Japanese translation services provider. In the meantime, I hope this article proves to be useful to some extent to readers who may be engaging a Japanese translation services provider or simply trying to understand the Japanese language.