Japan's population was approximately 126.14 million in 2019. From the linguistic point of view, it is an almost homogeneous nation and the majority of the population uses the same language.

This means that the Japanese language is the ninth most spoken in the world. However, this language is scarcely spoken in any region outside of Japan.


There are many theories about the Japanese language origin. A group of academics believes that syntactically is similar to Altaic languages like Turkish or Mongolian. Influence from Korean is also recognized.

There is also evidence that its morphology and vocabulary were influenced in the prehistory by the Malay-Polynesian languages from the south.

The Japanese writing system derives from Chinese, even though the languages spoken in the respective countries are completely different.

After the introduction of Chinese writing around the 5th and 6th centuries, it was transmitted through two phonetic scripts that derived from Chinese characters: hiragana and katakana.

Japanese is an isolated language, although there are various theories that relate it to Korean and even to Austronesian languages, which are the group of languages spoken in Indonesia and the Pacific islands. Be it one thing or another, Japanese has a number of special characteristics that make it unique, although its phonological system shares many characteristics with English. The vowels, for example, are practically the same, except that the u must be pronounced without rounding the lips.

It certainly seems incredible that a word like crystal, which is very easy to pronounce for us, undergoes such a huge transformation in Kurisutaru.

This is because Japanese is very restrictive with syllables, and almost always requires consonants to go hand in hand with a vowel.

Another quality completely different from English is intonation. We use different intonations if we make a statement or ask a question.

But in Japanese, the pitch tends to rise throughout all sentences regardless of what is said. Instead, there are words that require a momentary lowering of the tone.

Regarding grammar, the differences are even more noticeable. It does not usually mark the plural except in rare cases. If there is a risk of confusion, something similar to the numerals is used. But be careful, they are not like ours.

In English there are countable and uncountable nouns. The former may be accompanied by authentic numerals, such as "two dogs" or "five cars," while uncountable require a previous expression such as "two teaspoons of salt" or "three packages of sugar."

In Japanese, all nouns are like the latter, that is, uncountable, and to dial the number they require a numeral plus a special numeric classifier that doubles as "teaspoons" and "packages" of the expressions above.

Professional Japanese translation services
Translating business texts and documents into Japanese becomes especially important as Japan is the third largest economy in the world, after the United States and China, and also the in terms of purchasing power.

Therefore, it is a benchmark from the perspective of consumption and new technologies. In addition, and due to its culture, it is a very important tourist attraction.

For all these reasons, we consider it key for companies and organizations to translate commercial services and offers into Japanese to generate demand, trust, and interest in a market with 140 million Japanese-speaking people.

The fact that only 3.7% of internet content is translated into Japanese is a great opportunity for companies that want to position themselves in this market.

When it comes to business, Japanese has different degrees of written formality and it is very important to capture the tone that you want to convey, because if you do not, it could be misinterpreted as a form of bad education.

That is why it must be a native Japanese professional translator who carries out the translation, as you will be the only one really capable of capturing all the different nuances of the language.

When you work with a professional agency, a native translator with experience in your sector will be assigned to your project. To always guarantee the highest quality, each Japanese translator must meet the following requirements: Japanese native translator, specialized degree in translation, fully updated professional, wide experience, specialist in different sectors and experience in the translation of documents and texts from any line of business.

Big agencies receive every day texts that must be translated into Japanese from anywhere in the world and from the most diverse sectors such as technology, the legal sector, marketing, medicine, tourism, art, international trade, engineering, audiovisual media, e-learning, retail, etc.

Their clients ask them for any type of format such as web pages, games, applications, instruction manuals, books, product descriptions, annual reports, press releases, articles, catalogs, contracts, emails, etc.

You can ask professional agencies for any of these Japanese translations services to or from other languages.