English to Japanese Translation: Opening this Important Market in Asia

Japanese is spoken as a first language by 125 million people worldwide, of which most (121 million) live in Japan. The use of Japanese as a second language is rather insignificant (about 1 million worldwide). This fact makes the language more homogeneous than other languages, such as English, French, or Spanish.

A peculiarity of Japanese is the use of double-byte characters, similar to Chinese. In fact, many characters are the same or similar in both languages, so that there is some comprehension in writing between the two language groups. As neither in Japanese nor in Chinese the characters correspond to pronunciation though, the spoken languages are a completely different matter.

Written Japanese consists of three important character sets: Katakana and Hiragana are made up of a sort of Japanese alphabet, except each character represents a full syllable. Katakana tends to be used more for foreign words and names as well as some recent words in the Japanese language. Hiragana is mostly used for simple verbs, verb conjugation, and particles of speech.

Most verbs, nouns, and Japanese names are written in Kanji. Kanji was brought to Japan by Buddhist monks more than 1200 years ago, and the influence of the Chinese writing is still visible in many characters, even though the Japanese characters have often been simplified. Each character corresponds to a complete word, and Kanji makes up the bulk of a Japanese text.

When you receive your English to Japanese translation back from your Japanese translator, you may be surprised to see a document with garbled special characters. That’s most likely because Japanese font hasn’t been installed on your computer.

To ensure that your text is treated properly in Japanese, I would suggest letting a translation agency take care of your entire job, rather than using an English to Japanese translator directly, unless you have someone in your company who is fluent in Japanese and knows how to process Japanese double-byte characters.

For a free quote for your English to Japanese translation from five pre-approved translation agencies, try my free Translation Quote Request Service for English to Japanese Translation . I selected five high-quality agencies that will compete for your business. You only need to submit your project description once to receive five competetive offers.

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