Reviewing a Japanese to English translation: a routine for second readers

A second reader is not there to translate the text again. The job is narrower and, done well, more useful: find the places where the English says something the Japanese does not, or fails to say something the Japanese does, and catch the slips that a tired translator stops seeing after the third draft. Style preferences come last, if at all.

What follows is the routine I use for Japanese to English review. It works in passes, because trying to check meaning, numbers, names and tone in a single read means checking none of them properly. Five passes sounds slow. On a typical business document most of them are quick, and the slow ones are slow for good reasons.

Before the first pass: get the right materials

Ask for three things before you open the files.

1. The source in an editable form, not only a PDF. You will want to search it, count things and copy numbers out of it.
2. The brief. Who reads the English, in which country, and for what. A press release for overseas investors and an internal memo for a joint venture team need different English.
3. Any style guide or glossary, plus answers to the questions that always come up: US or UK spelling, name order, whether era years should be converted, how the client's own company name appears in English.

It also pays to look at the Japanese itself for a minute. Source documents contain their own conversion slips (以外 typed where 意外 was meant, for example), and a translator who rendered the slip faithfully has not made an error, but someone should notice it. Running a paragraph or two through the checker on the front page and skimming for the homophone problems described in the piece on IME conversion errors takes very little time.

Pass 1: read the English alone

Read the target text without looking at the source, as the real reader will. Mark anything that makes you stop: a sentence you had to read twice, a pronoun with no clear owner, a paragraph that seems to contradict the one before it, a phrase that sounds translated.

Do not fix anything yet. These marks are symptoms. Some will turn out to be faithful renderings of an unclear source, which you report as a query rather than an error. Others point straight at a misreading.

Pass 2: segment by segment against the source

Now put the two texts side by side and work through them sentence by sentence. The main targets in this pass are omissions, additions and changed meaning. A quick count helps: if the Japanese paragraph has four sentences and the English has three, find out where the fourth went. Merging is often fine. Losing a clause is not.

Two features of Japanese cause a large share of meaning errors.

Subject drop

Japanese leaves the subject out whenever context makes it obvious, and the translator has to put one back. Take this line from an email:

来週の会議には出席できません。資料は事前にお送りします。 (raishū no kaigi ni wa shusseki dekimasen. shiryō wa jizen ni o-okuri shimasu.)

A draft might give: "He cannot attend next week's meeting. He will send the materials in advance." But if the email comes from the person who cannot attend, it should be "I cannot attend next week's meeting, but I will send the materials beforehand." The humble お送りします is the clue: the writer is talking about their own action.

For every sentence where the English has a subject that the Japanese did not, ask who it really is: I, we (the company), you (the reader), they, or something impersonal that English handles better with the passive. Check that the same choice holds through the document. A report that drifts between "we" and "the company" for the same actor reads as two different parties.

Negation at the end

Japanese puts the negation at the end of the sentence, after everything it applies to, so a reader of the English needs to know exactly what is being denied.

全員が参加するわけではありません。 (zen'in ga sanka suru wake de wa arimasen.)

This means "Not everyone will take part." A draft that says "Everyone will not take part" has turned partial negation into something that can be read as total. Watch for わけではない, とは限らない ("not necessarily") and 必ずしも〜ない, which all work this way.

Sentences with two negatives deserve a slow read:

この条件を満たさない場合、申請を受け付けないことがあります。 "Applications that do not meet this condition may not be accepted."

Both negatives need to survive. Losing one produces a sentence that is fluent, grammatical and the opposite of the source.

Pass 3: numbers, dates and counters

This pass is mechanical, which is why it gets skipped and why errors live here. List every number in the source, then find each one in the English. Search the Japanese for digits, for kanji numerals and for 万, 億 and 兆, because large numbers rarely appear as plain digits.

The scale words are the usual trap. Japanese groups numbers by four digits, English by three.

If the English says "¥12.5 million" for 1億2,500万円, the figure is out by a factor of ten. Check vague quantities too: 数千万円 means tens of millions of yen, not "several thousand".

Era years and fiscal years

Dates in formal Japanese documents often use the imperial era. 令和 (Reiwa) began on 1 May 2019, so 令和元年 (the first year) is 2019 and 令和7年 is 2025. To convert, add 2018 to a Reiwa year, 1988 to a Heisei (平成) year and 1925 to a Shōwa (昭和) year. The year 2019 is both 平成31年 (up to the end of April) and 令和元年 (from May), so a date in early 2019 written with 令和 is itself an error worth querying.

令和7年4月1日（火） is Tuesday 1 April 2025. When the source gives a weekday in brackets, check it against the date. If they disagree, the source is wrong somewhere, and the client needs to know which part to trust.

年度 is not the calendar year. 2025年度 usually runs from April 2025 to March 2026, and translating it as "2025" quietly moves events by a quarter. "Fiscal 2025" or "FY2025" keeps the distinction, as long as the document uses one form throughout. Company fiscal years do not always start in April, so check the client's own English reports if they exist.

Boundaries and counters

以上 and 以下 include the number; 未満 and 超 exclude it.

• 20歳以上: 20 and over
• 20歳未満: under 20
• 10名以下: 10 or fewer
• 1万円を超える: more than ¥10,000

Counters can hide meaning shifts. 3件 might be three cases, three inquiries, three orders or three matters, and "three cases" is wrong if the source is about customer messages. 2名 is two people, 5社 is five companies, 1点 is one item. The counter tells you what was counted, so make sure the English noun agrees.

Pass 4: names

Names are where a second reader can save a client real embarrassment, and where guessing does the most damage.

• Order. 山田太郎 can be "Taro Yamada" or "Yamada Taro". Either is defensible; mixing them in one document is not. Follow the brief, and if the brief is silent, raise it as a query rather than changing every name yourself.
• Readings. Many family names have more than one reading: 中田 can be Nakata or Nakada, 東海林 is usually Shōji. The translator should have checked a business card, a staff page or the company's own English materials. If no source is given, mark the name as unverified.
• Romanization. 大野 might appear as Ōno, Ohno or Ono. A person's own preferred spelling beats any system. Place names usually drop macrons in general English (Tokyo, Osaka) unless the style guide says otherwise.
• Honorific suffixes. 山田様 tells you nothing about gender. "Mr Yamada" is a guess. If the source does not show it, use the full name or rephrase.
• Organizations and titles. Companies usually have an official English name, and "Co., Ltd." or "Inc." should follow it rather than a literal rendering of 株式会社. Job titles such as 部長 or 課長 map to different English titles in different companies; the client's own business cards or website are the reference.

Pass 5: register and tone

Japanese marks politeness in verb forms and set phrases. English marks it through word choice, modal verbs, sentence length and how direct a request is. A translation can be accurate word by word and still sound wrong.

Literal rendering of fixed phrases is the commonest problem. お世話になっております opens almost every business email, and "Thank you for your continued support" at the top of every message reads oddly to an English reader. Often it is best dropped or folded into a natural opening. 恐れ入りますが rendered as "I am terribly sorry to trouble you, but" on every request makes the writer sound anxious.

The opposite fault also appears. ご確認ください is polite in Japanese; "Check it." is not polite in English. "Could you check the attached file?" carries the same weight. When the source mixes very formal and casual forms, the English should not flatten them all to one level, and when the source is consistently formal, the English should not drift into chatty marketing voice halfway down the page. For the Japanese side of these forms, the keigo email checklist covers the patterns that cause most trouble.

Writing up what you found

Comments are only useful if the translator can act on them quickly. I label every comment as one of four types:

1. Error: the meaning has changed, a number is wrong, something is missing.
2. Query: the source is unclear or a fact needs checking (a name reading, a fiscal year start).
3. Consistency: the same thing is handled two ways.
4. Preference: the English is correct, but you would phrase it differently. Keep these few, and say clearly that they are optional.

For each one, give the source segment, the current English, your suggestion and a short reason. "Negation lost: source says applications may not be accepted" is enough. A comment that just says "awkward" makes the translator guess what you meant.

Questions second readers ask

Should I rewrite sentences I would have translated differently?

Not as a rule. If the English is accurate, consistent and suits the reader, it stands, even if your version would differ. Mark it as a preference only when the change clearly helps the reader.

What if the translation was produced by machine translation and then edited?

The same passes apply, but give pass 2 more time. Machine translation output tends to be fluent, which hides dropped negations and invented subjects. The notes on checking machine-translated Japanese look at the patterns from the other direction.

Do I convert era years or keep them?

Follow the brief. For most English readers, a Gregorian date is clearer, sometimes with the era year in brackets where the document is legal or official and the original form matters. Whatever is chosen, use it everywhere.

How long should a review take?

It depends on density more than length. A page of prose with few figures moves fast. A single page of financial results with dozens of 億 figures and fiscal year references can take longer than ten pages of narrative, and it should.