Localization & translation in Japan: firms hoping to compete in Japan have come to realize that the path to globalization is not a simple one. Fortunately, there is a growing group of companies that has the road map and know exactly what needs to be done

Japan, Inc., June, 2003 by Stuart Braun

Peter Durfee, deputy director of the Japan Echo magazine editorial department, highlights the fact that localization in Japan remains key even in the present economic recession. "In the Japanese-to-English field--our area of specialization--high-quality communication in English is central to the efforts of Japanese companies wanting to expand their business in foreign markets," he says. With services including the organization of international conferences, media relations, translation and publication work for a range of private and public sector clients, the international magazine recognizes the increasing relevance of localization in Japan. "The Japanese are avid consumers of foreign culture and products," says Durfee. "While government and international organizations are, of course, always interested in communicating their positions to a global audience, individual politicians too are beginning to present their views to broad audiences in English," he says.

It is a fact that the majority of localization and translation work around the world is performed internally rather than by localization and translation companies, notes Michael Shannon of Bowne Global Solutions, the world's localization services company with over 2,000 full-time staff and worldwide access to 15,000 qualified linguistic resources covering more than 80 languages and dialects. "However," he adds, "Japanese multinationals and subsidiaries have increasingly realized the value of outsourcing non-core competencies over the past five years. There is more demand from Japanese multinationals and subsidiaries not only for Japanese to English, but also for Japanese to European and Asian language solutions." In addition, the level of customer requirements such as the number of languages, speed and the need for more sophisticated solutions has also "markedly increased," notes Shannon. "We expect this trend to continue," he says.

Despite Japan's stalling domestic economy, many segments of the Japanese market are continuing to remain attractive to foreign firms. John Machonis, vice president of sales and marketing at the localization firm Basis Technology, whose initial focus was helping US technology companies such as Amazon.com, Google and Lucent Technologies enter Asian markets, argues that the size and sophistication of the Japan market makes it an "extremely important" target for many technology companies. "The Japanese market is often the first target for international expansion," he says, "and the challenge for many foreign companies is that their software needs to be significantly re-engineered to operate properly in the Japanese language." But it's important for prospective companies to realize that in order to be successful in Japan their products need a lot more than just translation.

The recent expansion of Web localization has been pivotal to an increasingly globalized corporate culture. Mark Attaway, vice president of Asian operations at Lionbridge, a global localization firm with 1,200 employees worldwide, notes that though localized software and hardware products had, by the middle of the last decade, become standard in Japan, the trend has been ingrained since the expansion of the Web. "By the mid-90s, a company could no longer expect to sell any significant quantity of technology products without first localizing the products into Japanese. With the explosion of the Web, mobile Web access and, now, the rapid acceptance of broadband in Japan, localized online content is simply expected." In fact, "there is so much localized [and local] content now available on the Web," says Attaway, "that potential customers will simply jump to another site as soon as they realize there is no localized content available."