Many aspects of what happens to your documents after you order translations of them remain purposefully hidden from your sight but can affect accuracy, accountability, and security.
Engagement with your translation provider is the key to verifying whether the people doing your translations have these skills. But substantial engagement with a bulk translation seller is virtually impossible.
There are serious differences between bulk translation brokers and translation companies that actually have translation capabilities themselves. Active engagement with your translation provider can help you discover which you are dealing with.
Are your Japanese documents being translated by people who understand the texts they are translating? Probably not, for reasons that are not obvious and seldom discussed.
Japanese-to-English translators with neither Japanese nor English as a native language can look forward in the near future to replacement by machine translation systems suffering from the same handicap.
One troublesome characteristic of the Japanese language is the uncertainty of how Japanese personal names are pronounced. Many names can be pronounced in numerous ways, the pronunciation options sometimes being totally different.
A version of a paper presented at the IJET-5 Conference in Urayasu (Chiba), 1994.
Presentations & Publications
Getting from Tier Two to Tier One in Japanese to English Translation
The founder's 2019 presentation at the last IJET Conference to be held before the Covid pandemic. It might not offer advice that many colleagues could take or implement, but the content has certainly not gone stale. This content currently resides in our Content for Translators section.
A greatly revised version of this content describing Japanese-to-English patent translation for US filing, fixing some content of the original version (March 1997) which has gone stale in the years since the original was published.