Business Translation Service

Within the large category of business translation, I am involved mainly in translation related to IT and computers. While Chris Translation is also engaged in localization, or translation of software products and the manuals that come with them, my job is to improve the quality of Japanese translations that underlie business communications.
With the current spread of the Internet, we have received a rapidly increasing number of orders for translation of English articles posted on websites.

The hardest part of translating IT-related materials is correctly translating the newly coined words and compound words that describe new concepts emerging continuously.

For example, byte, a unit which is now commonly used to express data storage capacity, was originally coined by IBM. Documents on IT are often written or read by young people. They use relatively colloquial, easy expressions even in formal sentences and translation of such documents require a sense like that of translating literary works.

I have been engaged in work related to computers and English for over 30 years. However, just the past accumulated experience and knowledge are not enough for translation.
We have to not only acquire the latest knowledge and learn the usage of the latest terms by brainstorming, but also collaborate with internal and external translators to combine their wisdom.

The expression "out of the box", which has recently come into widespread use for product PR, is a good example. I was puzzled by this expression when I first encountered it a few years ago. In general dictionaries, this expression is translated as a phrase used in Australia and New Zealand to express "splendid" or "wonderful." However, in many cases, these translations did not make sense in the context. I consulted an in-house native translator about the phrase and found that it means "ready-to-use" or "easy to use."

In addition, as technical development has recently been advanced in globalized environments, we are increasingly required to translate documents written by engineers whose mother tongue is not English. In many cases, these documents are valuable in content, but contain big grammatical errors.

In such cases, we try to understand the documents correctly based on adequate background knowledge and find easy-to-understand expressions in order to provide translations that are higher in quality than the original documents. This is our consistent stance and our pride as a translation company.