Japanese Translation Services
Professional Japanese translation for manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and technology organizations. Business Team Translations provides Japanese translation services across technical, medical, and commercial domains.
Japanese is an active part of our translation and interpreting work — particularly for manufacturing clients with Japanese-language operations and pharmaceutical companies requiring Japanese regulatory documentation.
Our Japanese translators are native Japanese speakers working into their first language, with subject-matter expertise in the relevant domain. Japanese translation requires particular attention to register — the formal, technical, and business registers of Japanese are significantly different from everyday usage.
Language Directions
English, German, Hungarian, and other European languages.
English, German, Hungarian, and other European languages.
Japanese is the official language of Japan and spoken by approximately 125 million people. It uses three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) and has a complex honorific system that requires careful handling in business and official communication.
Selected Clients
Pharmaceutical documentation including Japanese-language specialist texts.
On-site consecutive interpreting including Japanese alongside English and Hungarian.
AV control systems interface documentation from English into Japanese and 7 other languages.
Simultaneous interpreting for marketing conferences covering Japanese and 9 other languages.
Sports governance documentation into Japanese and 26 other languages.
Quality Process
All translation is delivered under our ISO 17100:2015 certified quality process.
Professional or academic background in the relevant domain — not general language proficiency.
Every translation reviewed by a second qualified linguist before delivery.
Client glossaries maintained and applied across all projects.
Consistency across document versions and over time.
Named project manager from quotation to delivery.
What we translate in Japanese
The document types that make up most of our Japanese workload, each handled by translators with a background in that field.
Manuals, specifications and maintenance documentation for equipment and systems, prepared to Japanese documentation conventions.
Patent specifications, priority documents and office actions, where a term choice defines the scope of the claim.
Documentation for Japanese regulatory review, including device and pharmaceutical material.
UI strings, help content and product documentation for Japanese-market software releases.
What makes Japanese translation different
Every language creates its own problems. These are the ones that decide whether Japanese work succeeds or has to be redone.
Japanese mixes kanji, hiragana and katakana in a single sentence, with katakana carrying loanwords. Whether a technical term appears in kanji, in katakana, or is left in Latin script is a real editorial choice that varies by industry and by company — and it has to be made once and applied consistently. Left to individual translators it will vary within the same manual.
The politeness level expected in a contract, a user manual and a marketing page differ substantially, and Japanese encodes this grammatically rather than through word choice alone. Getting it wrong does not read as a small stylistic miss; it reads as either brusque or absurdly deferential, and Japanese readers notice immediately.
Japanese is written without spaces and wraps by character, subject to kinsoku rules governing which characters may not begin or end a line, and it may be set vertically. DTP tools configured for Latin script break these rules silently, producing text that looks acceptable to a Western eye and wrong to a Japanese one.
Japanese translation: common questions
Do you handle patent and regulatory Japanese?
Yes, with translators whose background is in the relevant technical field rather than general Japanese. In patent work in particular, the choice between two apparently synonymous terms can narrow or widen a claim, which is why subject-matter qualification is not negotiable for this content.
How is Japanese translation priced?
On source volume, with the basis stated on the quotation — character count where Japanese is the source, source words where it is the target. We say which applies so that quotes remain comparable.
Can you produce Japanese-language layout?
Yes, including vertical setting where the document calls for it, correct kinsoku line breaking and proper Japanese fonts. As with Chinese, these are errors that are invisible unless someone who reads the language checks the proof — which is part of what we do rather than something we assume you will catch.
Ready to discuss your Japanese translation project?
Tell us about your documents, languages, and deadline. We will prepare a detailed proposal within one business hour.