K International provides a specialist Japanese Translation Service. By using in-country teams of Japanese translators and copywriters, all professionally qualified, we are able to translate your documents into Japanese.

All projects at K International are managed by our bi-lingual project managers. Our team will keep you informed of the progress of your project either dynamically via our web portal or directly via email/telephone.

All documents will be checked by an independent Japanese translator before being returned to you on time and ready for use.

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Clients who we provide a Japanese Translation service to include, Aston Martin, DHL, Chrysler, Visit Britain and the UK Government.

Applications of our Service

Whether you need to...

• Translate a website into Japanese
• Produce a leaflet in Japanese
• Add Japanese subtitles to a DVD
• Translate your business card into Japanese
• Translate Japanese to English
• or any other Japanese language project

We will have a solution to help. Contact K International today to talk through your next Japanese project.

The Japanese language

The population of Japan is 130 million people (all packed into an island the size of the UK or New Zealand) almost all Japanese speak Japanese. Outside of Japan the language is spoken by additional 2 million people in countries including, Singapore, USA, Hawaii, Peru, Australia, Taiwan, Philippines Guam, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Guadalcanal and Palau.

The written language consists of a mixture of scripts, these are, hiragana, katakana and Chinese characters called kanji. Each plays its own part in written Japanese. Hiragana is used for verb inflection and adding grammar onto the characters. Katakana is used to ‘spell out’ load words (see K International’s 2008 calendar) and western words such as trade names and logos (we’d use katakana if you asked us to translate you business card into Japanese). Kanji characters are taken from the original Chinese characters and form the core of the Japanese vocabulary, although they are pronounced differently making the two languages very different when spoken.

The difficult part to understand in the Japanese language is that Japanese is neither a subject language nor a topic language, it is both. An example would be, the way you would talk about something. If you are talking about how nice the sky is, you would be talking about an object, if you were judging the way the sky looked, you would use a different type of sentence to the first sentence. An example in Japanese that distinguishes a sentence is using just a word, which is ‘ga’ or ‘wa’. The sentence would translate exactly the same; it is just spoken in a different concept, using the words ‘ga’ or ‘wa’.

Japan, Nippon or Nihon

Japan is the English word for Japan and is not used in the Japanese language. The Japanese name for Japan is Nippon or Nihon. The Japanese word Nippon is used for official purposes like postage stamps or Japanese money. Nihon is used in a casual term, usually in contemporary speech.

Nihon and Nippon translate “the sun’s origin” and sometimes translated as the Land of the Rising Sun. Before Japan had any contact with China it was known as Yamato which means ‘source of the sun’.

The English word for Japan came from early trade routes. The word was recorded by Marco Polo from early Chinese Mandarin, on his travels around the world. It is thought that Portuguese traders encountered the word in the 16th century and brought to Europe, first recorded in English in 1577 and spelt Giapan.

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