Japanese-To-English Translating

Questions and Answers

Question: Why pay for a translator when I can get a machine translation for free?

Answer: Machine translations of typical Japanese documents rarely make much sense because Japanese sentences have an entirely different grammar structure.

Question: I've heard that Japanese is the language of ambiguity. Is it possible for a Japanese document to be translated so that it sounds like natural English?

Answer: Yes. While Japanese can be written with amazing levels of ambiguity, that isn't the intention of technical documents. Ambiguities can best be avoided if the translator understands what the author was trying to say. Japanese can be translated into into normal sounding English, but it requires extensive rearrangement of the text.

Question: How can you tell a good translation?

Answer: A translation shouldn't sound like it was translated from another language. We try to express the ideas as if the Japanese writer had been reared and educated in an English-speaking country. We assume that the original authors would appreciate seeing their ideas written in a way that sounds normal, natural, and educated.

Question: Why do you only translate from Japanese into English. Shouldn't you also be able to translate from English into Japanese

Answer: It is extremely rare for a person to be a competent technical writer in both languages. Studies have shown that even people who appear to be comfortably bilingual will almost always have considerably greater skill in one language than in the other.

Question: Why do Japanese translations generally sound so vague and odd?

Answer: Many Japanese documents are translated by translators whose native language is Japanese. They don't have the skill to write well in English. They cannot select the most appropriate terms or use English grammar to convey subtleties.

Question: What are the advantages of working with an individual translator rather than with a translation agency?

Answer: Translations can often be improved if the client and translator can communicate directly with each other. For example, if I recognize that a section of a document is irrelevant to a customer's needs, I'll ask if the section should be translated. Translation agencies usually don't let clients have direct contact with the translators. They are afraid that the translator will steal their customer.

Question: Some agencies guarantee that the translation will be checked by a second party. Isn't that a good idea?

Answer: In theory, yes. However, most of the checkers at agencies are not competent to perform this task. They're generally native Japanese who expect English phrases to conform to the original Japanese pattern. They're not familiar with all the variations that are legitimate in well written English. Translators who have to please these checkers are highly constrained in how they can express the original ideas, and the resulting translations often sound awkward. Moreover, the checkers do not have scientific training, and do not actually catch errors in technical terminology. All you can expect from a normal checker is that they will catch an occasional dropped phrase or grammar error. If you really want to have your document checked by a second technical translator, we can offer that service.

Question: How do you estimate how much a translation will cost?

Answer: One Japanese character (including kana) is approximately equivalent to one half of an English word. Subjects that contain a lot of foreign words, such as computer manuals or chemical papers, will have fewer English words. Conversely, texts with many dense character phrases will have more. To estimate the number of English words, we count the number of kanji and kana and multiply by a factor of between 0.5 to 0.6.

Question: Will you treat the materials I send you with confidentiality?

Answer: Your materials will be kept absolutely confidential.