Japanese to English Website Translation: A Case Study

page upated January 6, 2023

English is by far the most used language on the web, with W3Techs estimating (as at March 2020) that 59.3% of the top ten million websites are in that language. The next closest contender is Russian, with 8.4%. Japanese also makes it into the top ten most used languages on the web, taking the number eight spot, with 2.4% of the top ten million sites being in Japanese. 

The Tomedes team recently contributed to the furthering of English’s position as the lingua franca of the internet by helping a client to translate her website from Japanese to English. 

The new client called on Tomedes as a result of our reputation for accurate translation. Back in 2018, business to business (B2B) ratings platform Clutch flagged Tomedes up as one of the leading B2B companies in Asia and Africa. Our readily available Japanese to English and English to Japanese services continue to serve businesses in Asia, with the most recent example being this client’s website translation. 

The client had already looked into website translation in some detail, so understood that she needed a company that would not just translate her site but also localize it, to ensure that the original content met the needs of an English-speaking audience in the right way. She turned to Tomedes based on both our reputation for accurate translation and our experience of Japanese website translation. 

We discussed the client’s needs and assigned an expert Japanese website translator to the job at once. 

What Makes A Good Japanese Website Translation Agency?

Website translation has been a core part of Tomedes’ business model ever since the company was first founded, well over a decade ago. We deliver Japanese website translation services in a large number of language pairings, helping businesses to reach new audiences and expand their geographic and economic footprint. 

This was precisely what our recent client was looking to do. Her Japanese website had been a huge success and she felt the time was right to replicate that success with English-speaking audiences. Enter Tomedes’ professional translator!  

As well as our website translating skills, the client was looking to take advantage of our website localization. Tomedes has been localizing websites for as long as we’ve been translating them, so requests for web localization are our bread and butter. In the case of this client, we discussed her business plans and what she hoped to achieve through her website translation project. We covered target audiences and she shared details of the personas that her original website was shaped to suit, along with the English equivalents of those personas. 

This meant that Tomedes was in a strong position to shape the website localization precisely to the needs of its intended audience, thus maximizing its chances of success. 

Top of the client’s priority list was a high-quality website translation. She had spent years building up the reputation and success of her Japanese business, never compromising the quality of her output.d. As such, she was determined to apply this same rigorous attention to quality to the English-language side of her endeavor. 

It is always a pleasure to provide translations to clients who are as exacting when it comes to language as our own website translators. When it comes to translation, accuracy and quality of language are everything. This is why machine translation has not wiped out the entire human translation industry – because quality counts! 

Working with a client who has such a deep understanding of both the value and the complexity of localization is very enjoyable. We try our best to laymanize our website localization process , so we often walk clients through what localization is, explaining how it can help to ensure their website engages its new readers in precisely the way they would like. 

In this instance, the client was already familiar with the purpose of localization and how it could benefit her website, so was keen to discuss it with her Tomedes account manager. Going through the site’s purpose and target audience in detail meant that our team was ideally placed to provide the expert localization that needed to form part of her Japanese to English website translation. 

You can read a further example of our website localization work, this time from English to Japanese, rather than vice versa, by clicking the link below. 

Read more: English to Japanese Business Translation and Website Localization

Where Can I Find a Professional Japanese Website Translator?

When it comes to providing professional translation, whether for a website or any other kind of document or file, Tomedes always relies on native speakers of the target language. In this instance, translating from Japanese to English, that meant using a native English-speaking Japanese website translator. Had the language pairing been reversed – English to Japanese – we would have used a native Japanese linguist. 

Being able to provide native translators at short notice is a cornerstone of any established, successful translation company. This is why Tomedes has spent more than ten years building up a global network of language professionals. In this instance, it meant we were able to call upon a suitably skilled and experienced Japanese website translator at a moment’s notice. 

Tomedes’ Japanese translators are kept busy by a huge variety of client needs. Indeed, our Japanese to English translation service for websites delivers expertise ranging from video translation to legal translation, along with everything in between. 

Every form of translation requires outstanding linguistic skill and Japanese to English translation is no exception. The Foreign Service Institute ranks Japanese as one of the hardest languages for English-speakers to learn, with it taking around 2,200 hours to achieve speaking and reading proficiency. By way of comparison, the easiest languages to learn, such as Spanish and Norwegian, take as little as 575 hours of study. 

For native English speakers seeking sufficient mastery of the language to work as a Japanese to English website translator, the level of study required is intense – but the outcome is certainly rewarding. 

In this case, our Japanese to English website  translator was a fluent speaker of both languages, having been raised in a bilingual home. This is a superb grounding for a future career as a translator.

However, successful website translation is down to more than just skill with language. The translator must also possess first-rate technical skills and excellent attention to detail. In the case of this client’s Japanese website translation, we were delighted to be able to provide a translator who ticked all of the right boxes. The client was delighted with the result and we were thrilled to have delivered such an impressive translation. 

Reach Out to Us for any Translation Need – Free Quote Provided

If your business is in need of a website localization, Tomedes is here to help. Our talented team of linguists are ready and waiting to translate and localize your content in order to help you achieve your strategic and financial goals. You can call, email or live chat with a member of the Tomedes team in order to kickstart your project. We look forward to hearing from you.