As promised in our previous article about DeepL we had a look at the Japanese version that was just released recently. At first, we had a look at the Japanese to English translation only. A review of the opposite direction will follow. For testing purposes, we let DeepL translate some of our blog articles that were originally written in Japanese into English and compared the results with the English version of a human translator.

General Impression of the DeepL Japanese to English translation

Overall, the results that DeepL produced were understandable English most of the time. The writing style was quite different from that of a human translator.

In terms of online content like blog articles, translators can word their translations more freely as for example with legal texts. DeepL, however, sticks to the original Japanese text which results in English that does not sound natural and is not very engaging for readers.

In the following, we will discuss specific issues.

Translation of long Japanese sentences

In Japanese texts, you sometimes find long sentences with several subclauses that contain a lot of information. DeepL tends to translate these sentences into a single English sentence but a lot of times it would be better to break the sentence apart in the translation.

This is an example of from one of our blog articles about Kanda where we talk about the Manseibashi station translated by DeepL and a human translator.

DeepL

The station building was a luxurious red brick building designed by Kingo Tatsuno, like Tokyo Station, but unfortunately it was destroyed by fire in the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.

Human translator

Manseibashi’s layout was designed by Tatsuno Kingo, who was also responsible for the design of Tokyo Station. It was a gorgeous red-bricked building, which unfortunately burned down in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.

The text is easier to read in English when broken into two sentences. Also, the DeepL translation implies that the station was designed like Tokyo station, whereas the intent was to say it was designed by the same architect.

Difficulty to distinguish the subject

Japanese is a very context heavy language and subjects are often omitted because is obvious from the context. However, DeepL does not always understand the context correctly. In this example from an article where we talk about the training of our translators, DeepL came up with this translation.

Translators are trained on-the-job and taught by their seniors the basics of technical knowledge, how to learn and the necessary books, in addition to how to translate. Of course, this is not enough, but I will research and study by myself based on the knowledge I have acquired here, and I will work hard to improve my level.

We are talking about how our translators keep improving but DeepL considers I to be the subject. Overall, the sentence structure seems unnatural as well.

Mistranslations of Japanese terms

 In another of our blog articles about Kanda we use the Japanese term “火事に遭う” (Kaji ni au) which means getting caught in a fire, suffer from a fire, etc. DeepL translated it as “meet a fire”. “Au” can be translated as meet in other contexts, but the term “Kaji ni Au” is a fixed term that you can look up in dictionaries.

DeepL

If you meet a fire, you have a lot to lose,

Human translator

Although they stood to lose a great deal in the event of a fire

Final thoughts 

The translations of DeepL are decent for a machine translation and better than other free machine translation from Japanese to English we have seen so far. They transport the general meaning of the text most of the time and can, therefore, be used if you just need to quickly check what a text is about. If you need to know small details or if you need a translation for publishing however DeepL is not of much use to you.

Especially for online content we cannot recommend it, as writing style in Japanese and English can be quite different and you will a need a human translator that understands the intent of the Japanese text and puts it into a wording that sounds natural and engaging to an English reader. Also depending on the audience texts need to be adjusted, e.g. when talking about Japanese cultural aspects that are not well-known in the rest of the world you might need additional explanations in the English translation. DeepL cannot do that for you.

However, with the nonsensical results that most other free online translators come up when translating from Japanese to English DeepL can be considered as quite an improvement.

If you need natural-sounding and engaging translations of online content, please feel free to contact us for a free quote.

 

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