
Japanese is also spoken in emigrant communities worldwide. Although many Japanese speakers consider Ryukyuan, the native language of the Okinawan archipelago, to be a dialect of Japanese, most linguists consider it to constitute a language unto itself. The two most distinct of these are the Tokyo-type dialect and the Kyoto-Osaka-type dialect, which differ in terms of cadence, intonation and vocabulary. Within Japanese there are many different sub-dialects which are largely mutually intelligible. At different points in history, however, the Japanese language has also been spoken across Taiwan and Korea, as well as in certain parts of China and the Philippines.

Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan across each of the country’s four main islands: Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Okinawa. Japanese is the 9th most-spoken language worldwide, but it’s the third-largest language on the Internet, behind English and Spanish.The Japanese written language is considered one of the world’s most difficult to learn, with 4 distinct systems of writing: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji.Unlike English, which is closely tied to Romance and Germanic languages, Japanese is not closely related to any other major language.Japanese is the official and main language of Japan and spoken by roughly 127 million people.Despite close geographic proximity, the Japanese language shares very little with Korean and makes only limited use of Latin script, which is typically reserved for imported acronyms and the like. Although Japanese has no genetic relationship to Chinese, Chinese characters, or Kanji, make up one of the three alphabets used in written Japanese, along with Katakana and Hiragana. Japanese is part of the Japonic language family. While machine translation can be useful for translating single words or basic text, it’s far from business-ready. More often than not, machine translation from English to Japanese or Japanese to English is clunky, unnatural and in extreme cases, incomprehensible. No machine translator can as yet produce native-sounding Japanese. Gengo’s native Japanese translators possess an intimate knowledge of both the Japanese language and Japanese culture, making them well-placed to ensure your content is both appropriate and effective. Accordingly, a simple word-for-word translation from English to Japanese may at best be ineffective and at worst be read as rude. It’s important to note that English business writing tends to be much less formal than Japanese business writing. A key feature of this is honorifics, which are in practice different titles used to show varying degrees of respect. Unlike English, the Japanese language has many levels of politeness, each with their own subtle differences. It’s extremely important to define your target audience in Japan. Japanese Translation Tips Know your audience
