Japanese Translation Services

When localizing into the Japanese market, you should pay attention to the below useful tips for a successful Japanese localization project:

• Japanese is the national language and the most widely spoken in Japan. All education, media, business, and government documents are in Japanese.
• It is estimated that there are about 128 million Japanese speakers all over the world.
• Japanese people expect pure perfection. Spelling and grammar mistakes or beta versions are not welcomed.
• Since each dialect differs from the other not only in terms of pronunciation but also grammar and vocabulary, native Japanese is always preferred when it comes to Japanese translation.
• The top search engines in Japan are Yahoo!, Google, Bing.com, and Goo.
• Colors have clear meanings in Japan. Colors with positive meanings are red (luck), yellow (courage), and blue (peace) while colors with negative meanings include black/white (mourning), purple (danger), etc.
• Japanese websites often display a range of varying colors which include blue, red, pink, orange, and even yellow. Also, they usually have heavy use of text, small graphics, and cute elements.
• Animated interface elements are common.
• Japanese has complex writing scripts. Modern Japanese uses a mixture of three different writing scripts: Kanji (the adopted logographic Chinese characters), Hiragana, and Katakana – two phonetic alphabets.
• Traditionally, Japanese is written in columns going from top to bottom, with columns ordered from right to left. Meanwhile, modern Japanese is written horizontally and read from left to right.
• Written Japanese normally does not require spaces between words, with the full stop (。) and comma (、) having the same function as their equivalents in English.
• For Japanese texts in translation, counting characters is the standard method because there is no clear algorithm to find out where one word ends and the other starts.
• The Japanese language uses honorific suffixes when communicating. These suffixes are various and used for different genders, ages, and social statuses.
• Both horizontal and vertical writing orientations are widely used for different purposes.
• Pronunciation and meanings of Japanese borrowed words might differ from their original words.
• Texts in Japanese are usually 20-55% shorter than in English.
• Japanese people use the metric system of measurement (meters, kilometers, km/h, and Celsius). When measuring space, people usually use jo which is about 1.6 square meters. The unit of rice is going (1 go is 180 milliliters).
• Yen (￥) is the only currency used in the Japanese market.
• The date format is year-month-day.
  Both 24-hour and 12-hour clock is widely used. 24-hour notation is commonly used in train schedules. When using the 12-hour notation, people add 午前 (“before noon”) or 午後 (“afternoon”). This format is used by broadcasting and newspapers.
• The full name format is the family name followed by the given name.
• Addresses start with the postal code, followed by the prefecture, city, and subarea(s), and end with the recipient’s name. Some books and comics in Japanese are designed to be read from right to left, top to bottom, starting on the right-hand page before continuing to the left.