One Hour Translation Blog

Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese embody a considerable part of the American translation industry, particularly the West Coast. Also, despite the high potential of profit in translating those languages for commercial use, many professional translation firms and individual translation services have very little knowledge about Asian languages. Moreover, the complexity of these dialects is also a good reason why human translation is a must when translating anything and machine translation is at best left as an assistance tool.

Asian Languages Prefer Simplicity over Verbosity

Eastern languages usually eschew the linguistic tools that their western and Indo-European counterparts rely on. For example, neither Chinese nor Japanese have any verb tenses as Russian or French speakers are used to, neither requires its speakers to determine whether a noun is plural or singular unless completely needed, and neither identifies gender, articles, cases, or declensions as westerners know them in German, Spanish, or English. To be more specific, here are a couple of points to remember when translating eastern languages:

• Lack of Plurals and Singulars: Like with the English word “sheep”, there is no plural form for nouns like “cat” in most eastern languages, particularly Japanese. You can get away with simply saying “cat” and referring to either one or a thousand felines by doing so. Context and the addition of a number with its “counter” (a part of speech used to determine what’s being modified by the number) serve as a person’s only clues in regards to the singularity or plurality of a given being, concept, or thing.

• Lack of Gender Distinction: Moreover, Asian tongues don’t identify the gender of a given subject (that is, whether someone or something is of male, female, or neutral gender). Languages like Spanish usually refer to a male cat as “gato”, while in English it’s referred to as a “tomcat”. There’s a lack of any such gender distinction in languages like Chinese or Japanese. Japanese translation services and other east languages translation services would probably need extra context research in order to tell whether a person being referred in the text is a he or she.

• Lack of Inflection: Compared to languages like Spanish and French that have three moods (imperative, subjunctive, or indicative) and a multitude of verb conjugations, or Russian and German that have adjectives and nouns that continually change endings depending on what they are accomplishing in a sentence, or most European languages that have many “the” forms, words hardly ever get altered in any way, shape, or form in eastern languages.

• Lack of Verb Tenses: Only in a language like Japanese can “The dog died tomorrow” be grammatically correct. It’s a perfectly natural occurrence in Japanese syntax because as long as the event has already happened, the perfect tense can be used and an adverb of time can be casually added without any incident. Human translation becomes a key factor here in order to keep tabs on what the intended tense of a document is.

• Lack of Word Order: Korean and Japanese follow one rule in word order management-the verb always comes at the tail end of the sentence. As for Chinese and other Sino-based languages, the verb is reserved in the second position. Ergo, a normal Japanese phrase can usually be transliterated like a saying made by Yoda of Star Wars fame. Professional translation firms need to take particular note of this fact in order to keep themselves in business when translating Asiatic documents and correspondences.

These and many other unique characteristics have made Asian languages as inscrutable as their cultures to many a westerner. However, you should not fret; they’re just unique dialects. Aside from these quirks, they’re still languages just like any other languages on Earth.

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