Translation & Interpretation

(Business need professional interpreter, Japanese Language introduction, translate between Japanese and English)

Japan boasts the largest and most diverse economy in Asia, and is second only to the U.S. on the world's economic stage. Japanese consumers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on food, clothing, travel, entertainment and a wide variety of other consumer goods and services each year. The top Japanese firms are among the most efficient and best-run firms in the world. Unemployment is down to about 4.1%, lower than in most developed countries. The average Japanese household has over $100,000 in savings, and disposable income of about $4,000 per month. Japan is the largest overseas market for world exporters.

Entering the Japanese market can benefit by finding a reputable, well-connected agent or distributor to represent them in the market. In addition, it is extremely important to cultivate business contacts through frequent personal visits.

Japanese attach a high degree of importance to personal relationships, and these take time to establish and nurture. Patience and repeated follow-up are required to clinch a deal. Unless you possess excellent Japanese language skills, foreign business executives should be accompanied by a professional interpreter, as many Japanese executives and decision makers do not speak English.

Japanese is a challenging language for most that didn't learn it as children. Not like English, Japanese is a literally unique language. Linguistics scholars have classified all modern languages into huge "families" that are related through their grammars and vocabularies. For instance, English and other familiar European languages such as French and Spanish are in the Indo-European family. English is in the Germanic branch, while French and Spanish are in the Italic branch. However, despite the breadth of modern linguistics categories, there are several holdout languages that simply do not have cognates in any other currently spoken language. These include Basque, Ainu, and Japanese.

Thus, it is important to approach the learning of Japanese with this concept in mind: all the grammar you learned in school does not quite "map onto" Japanese. You probably learned that there are various main parts of speech-- nouns, verbs; adjectives, adverbs-- and those they can be arranged in certain combinations to impart certain meanings. You learned about subjects/predicates, gerunds, participles, and dependent clauses. Japanese has some of these grammatical structures, but not all. And it has some that do not exist in English, German, or the other languages.

So it's not quite accurate to approach the learning of Japanese with the idea that you will learn how to deal with nouns, verbs, and adjectives first, and then figure out how to construct phrases and clauses, etc. There just aren't exact analogs to all those grammatical concepts! So from the beginning, you have to toss out your idea of what an adjective is, and you have to toss out your preconceived notion of how phrases and clauses are connected to the subject of the sentence. This is no simple task-- these grammatical "rules" have been etched into our brains from the time we first picked up our native tongue as tiny children.

One thing you may have heard about "Asian languages" is that tonality of speech is crucially important. Westerners are routinely warned that mispronouncing a word could lead to a completely different and possibly insulting meaning. This is indeed true, but perhaps not quite as dramatically as you've been warned.

Like most Asian languages, but unlike most Western languages, Japanese does not use emphasis to mark accent. This gives the language its distinctive, rather "flat" sound-- even long words do not have a stressed syllable. However, Japanese does use pitch-- high and low-- to distinguish words. The pitch is applied to each syllable, not within a given syllable as it is in Chinese. For example, "ima" can mean "now" or "living room", the difference being the pitch between the two syllables, not the stress. In a few cases, you could get in trouble using the wrong pitch (and in any case you'd sound funny), but usually the context of the conversation will indicate what you mean. Overall, pitch isn't as big a deal in Japanese as it is made out to be.

Most Japanese tutorials and textbooks make no attempt to explain the fundamentals of Japanese grammar. They simply present the language as a series of patterns to be memorized. "When you want to say such-and-such, you use the expression so-and-so." This is a practical approach, but hardly satisfying in the long run. Who enjoys just memorizing new patterns with no sense of the overall structure?

However, if you try to look beyond lists of patterns, the texts can become quite scholarly, using ideas from formal linguistics. This might be illuminating for a linguist, but the rest of us just want to learn some Japanese.

You don’t need to be a professional linguist to understand some discussion about grammatical structure. You will find Japanese much more satisfying once you learn some actual grammar, rather than just memorizing patterns.