Japanese Translation Agency Arc Communications – Blog

Germany is well known as an environmentally advanced country. The Japanese people are familiar with philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, and thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Germany has produced many great talents in the fields of literature, physics, and music as well. The German language is also spoken as the official language of many European countries. This means that an ability to understand German broadens one's range of communication, while at the same time making it possible to deepen one's knowledge in a variety of areas. Let's take a look at some of the appealing aspects of the German language.

German is, of course, a Germanic language, and is the native tongue of approximately 100 million people. Like English and Dutch, it is classified as a West Germanic language, so it shares many traits with English. It also has many similarities to the North Germanic languages, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish.

Although Japan has seen some signs of economic recovery, the global economy is still far from booming levels. The environment surrounding the translation and interpretation service industry has been dramatically changing due to the advancement of machine translation and communication technologies. What does the future of the translation and interpretation service industry look like? We will analyze it based on U.S. business reports.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the translation and interpretation service industry is expected to grow by 46% between 2012 and 2022. The reasoning behind this prediction is presumed to be that language is an essential communication tool in the globalized society, and also that the translation and interpretation service industry, which deals with languages, is relatively insulated from the influence of the economic conditions.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan has been increasing owing to the weak yen and the "Cool Japan" promotion. In addition, the acceptance of foreign workers is expanding in preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Consequently, there will be more chances to deal with foreigners who are sick, or who are visiting Japan for medical tourism; thus the need for translation and interpretation in the medical field is growing each year.

In a survey conducted in major hospitals in Tokyo, about 80% of hospitals responded that they are not able to adequately handle foreign patients. Their reasons were: they cannot support foreign languages except English; their communication capability with foreign patients is insufficient; they cannot quickly respond to foreign patients' visits; etc.

For the global expansion of business, information must be proactively transmitted to the entire world. Press releases related to new products and events, in particular, need to be promptly announced and hence the content of Japanese announcements needs to be translated expeditiously. In this article, we present the keys for ordering translations while maintaining timeliness.

First, let's consider the purpose of sending out press releases. The purpose of press releases is to have media reporters read them and transmit that information in the form of news articles. The readers of press releases meant for foreign countries are overseas media professionals. Grabbing their attention is the first step toward making the information known in that corresponding location.