How to Translate Japanese?

(Difference between English and Japanese grammar, English translate into Japanese, Japanese translate into English)

Ridiculous English grammar for Japanese native:

• "Should" as an indicator of uncertainty. There are cases where the otherwise unambiguous verb "should" is not used to mean "ought to." Think of the lyrics to the song "Stand by Me":

"If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall or the mountain should crumble to the sea..."
What? What a strange way to use "should"! The explanation turns out to be that "should" in this case is a subjunctive form of the verb "shall". The subjunctive often ends up looking like the past tense, but can in fact be used for uncertainty, to bring up a fictional condition "If I were a millionaire", and to be polite. Native English speakers just aren't so aware of this tense because we know the grammar intuitively.

• Use of present tense when telling stories. Have you noticed that we relate stories about the past in present tense? I suppose this adds drama or something. When you are telling your friend about what happened on the way home, you will slip into present tense: "So I'm walking down the street, right? And guess who shows up? My brother! And he looks really funny..."

I got some helpful email about this: "This might not really explain where it came from, but Latin has what is called a 'historical present,' meaning they used the present tense for past actions in order to make the reader feel like they are in the story. A very prominent example of this use is almost all of Caesar's Gallic commentary. These 'historical present' verbs are usually translated into the past tense in English." I claim no wisdom about whether this is a related phenomenon, but I'll throw it out as a possibility.

• Use of past tense instead of present in some polite phrases. There are times when we use past tense to mean present or future. For instance, "I had wondered if you were planning to go tomorrow..." What an odd thing to say! Clearly, it is that I am wondering right now, not that I "had wondered" some time in the past. And I don't want to know if you were planning to go, I want to know if you are planning to go. For some reason, using these past tense forms has come to be considered softer, and more polite.

Again, the explanation comes down to that subjunctive case. It can be used to soften language, and it looks like the past tense. Must be tough for non-native speakers.

• "Aren't I"? As we ask questions by inverting the subject and the verb. So "he is" becomes "is he?" and "you are" becomes "are you?" Following this pattern, the question we ask about ourselves is "am I?" since it goes with "I am."

But what about negative questions? For everyone except us, this is straight forward. We say "isn't she?" ("Yes, she is") and "aren't you?" ("Yes, you are"). By the same logic, we should say, "am't I?"
But we don't say "am't." We say "aren't I?" I suppose the grammatically correct answer would be "Yes, I are." (Weird, huh?)
Actually the perfectly acceptable contraction of "am I not" used to be "ain't." However, some dialects started using "ain't" as a contraction for all sorts of things, like "is not" and "have not." This came to be regarded as rural and low-brow, which led to the abandonment of "ain't" altogether in mainstream English. Oops, then there was no contraction for "am I not"! So people invented "aren't." At first, this sounded weird, but at least it didn't sound low-brow according to thinking at the time. Over time, it came to be normal.

• Present progressive as future tense. In some cases, we use the present progressive when we mean the future. For example, it is perfectly normal to say, "Tomorrow I am going to the store" or "Next week I am giving a seminar." Don't we mean that we will go to the store tomorrow and we will give a seminar next week?

Things to consider when translating Japanese to English
Japanese text expansion and contraction
Because Japanese is a character based language it can vary wildly depending on the content of your original document. Documents translated from English into Japanese can expand anywhere between 20 and 60%. And Japanese to English translations will contract somewhere between 10 and 55% of course this depends on the subject of the text.

Getting something as seemingly insignificant as this wrong will make a huge difference to the success or failure of your Japanese Translation project.