Reasons Why Auto-Translate Will Never Work for Japanese Language Translations

When it comes to translations, there are about as many opinions as there are heads. With AI being brought into the mix recently, the speculations have shot up in numbers. Now, there is a straight contention between manual translation and machine translation. The English to Japanese translation service is at the focal point of this discourse.

Being one of the most sought translation services in today’s times, people often wonder whether it’s a practical idea to go the machine way and save money or to get it done the conventional way by professionals and spend a little extra.

Unreliability of Machine Translation

The truth is, machine translation cannot be relied upon when it concerns official documents and reports that require high levels of accuracy. Nor can it be depended upon for advertisement materials that need preservation of the essence. Machines can do neither, and that makes the job sloppy and sketchy. You can make a case for technology, but technology, even in its smartest form, cannot learn a language to its fullness. The lack will always show through in the machine translation works.

Multiplicity of Scripts

English to Japanese translation is the last job you want to trust a computer software to do. The most obvious reason for that is the intricacy of the Japanese language. As it is, the Japanese language is a complex one. It has three scripts, namely the katakana, kanji and hiragana. A word written in one script means something else in the other. Some of these scripts again have loan words from foreign languages which makes it all the more confusing for robots to grasp.

A machine may be programed to substitute a word from a language with a word of similar meaning from another language, but it cannot be taught the subtle differences which only trained translators can recognize.

Incapability of Machines to Perform Creative Translations

Another reason why Google translator or any translating software will not work for English to Japanese translation is because machines are technically incapable of making creative translations. They are capable of creating syntaxes following grammatical rules and replace words to the best of their ability and lexicons, but in doing so, they cannot preserve the creative element of the text that only trained translators can do.

That’s why machine translation often fails to capture the warmth and naturalness of the scripts, delivering literal translations that are cold and sound artificial at best. Especially when you fed a software large amount of text from one language and hit the translate command, it produces a literally translated version which has problem syntaxes and inappropriate use of words.

Machines Can’t Translate Context

The Japanese language, just like English, is closely linked to its culture and people. What makes English to Japanese translation done by professionals perfect is the preservation of those cultural and contextual elements which communicate to the readers a certain sense of familiarity that literal translations fail to do. Consequently, the text often appears rude or blasé to the indigenous people.