Deep in the Woods of Language: The Challenge of Japanese-English Translation

People unfamiliar with the Japanese language (or with the translation industry in general) often tend to assume that translation between any two languages poses roughly the same degree of a challenge to the translator.

This is far from being the case, however, and the Japanese-English language pair must rank as one of the most difficult out there—if not the most difficult.

In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks all major languages in order of how difficult they are to acquire for native English speakers. Japanese is rated as the hardest (just ahead of Mandarin and Arabic), while Italian is adjudged the easiest.

Key Factors Behind the Difficulty

There are several contributing factors to why Japanese-English is so challenging:

1. Word Order

English sentences typically follow the subject-verb-object (SVO) order:

“the man found the black bear,” while Japanese employs SOV order 「男は黒熊を見つけました。」.

2. Omission of Subject

In fact, Japanese texts often omit the subject of the sentence altogether, e.g. 「黒熊を見つけました。」. The writer assumes that the subject of the sentence will be obvious to the reader. This is a feature which often trips up machine translation engines, such as Google Translate.

3. Lack of Articles

Unlike English, Japanese has no definite article (‘the’) or indefinite article ‘a’/‘an’. Thus, it is sometimes hard to know whether a Japanese phrase such as 「赤い車」 is describing a specific object “the red car”, or just any instance of this object—“a red car”. Again, the reader is expected to work it out for themselves from the context, and this is also a feature with which machine translation engines struggle.

4. Lack of a Distinct Plural Form

The plural form of almost all Japanese nouns is identical to the singular form. Since verb forms are not conjugated (which in other languages allows the reader to distinguish between a singular or plural subject), the translator will sometimes just have to guess, if the surrounding context is lacking. Hence 「赤い車」could mean “the red car”, “a red car”, “the red cars” or just “red cars” in general.

5. Clause Order

Japanese writers sometimes churn out long complicated sentences where the key information (the main clause) comes at the end, and ancillary information is supplied in a whole succession of subordinate clauses that precede the main clause. English writers tend to put the main clause first in a sentence, or precede it with no more than one (or exceptionally two) subordinate clauses.

6. Topic vs. Subject

Japanese is classed as a “topic-prominent” language, while English is a “subject-prominent” language. This essentially means that Japanese sentences are constructed around a specific topic (or theme), while English sentences tend to highlight the subject—the person or entity performing the action described by the main verb. This is a rather technical linguistic distinction, but the practical ramification is that typically a Japanese sentence does not neatly map to an equivalent English sentence in the same way that a French or Spanish sentence normally does.

7. Misleading Loanwords

There are many hundreds of loanwords in Japanese that have been borrowed from English, as well as from other European languages, such as Portuguese, Dutch, German and French. In some cases, however, these loanwords are “false friends”—that is, the meaning of the loanword in Japanese bears no relation to the meaning of the English word that it resembles. For example, the word 「コンセント」 (“konsento”) means an electrical socket, and has nothing to do with acquiescence or agreement. In other cases, the loanword may be contracted or distorted out of all recognition. For example, the word 「パソコン」 (“pasokon”) refers to a personal computer, but would not be understandable as-is to a native English speaker.

8. Cultural Differences

The differences between Japan and the English-speaking world in terms of culture and customs, which are often embedded in the language, introduce an extra level of complexity. For instance, a particular festival or religious practice peculiar to Japan may require extensive explanation for the native-English reader, whereas as a translation from French to Italian, for example, is unlikely to need any such elucidation.

Not All Language Pairs Are Created Equal

All these features combine to present a significant challenge to the translator working between Japanese and English (in either direction).

This is not to diminish the skills and talent of translators who work in other languages—just to emphasize that not all language pairs are created equal!

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Written by Honyaku Plus