The tsubo problem: reading a concrete quote in a bilingual household

The quote for the cracked driveway is on the table, and it is full of square feet, inches and cubic yards. The person who owns the house, perhaps a parent who has lived in Tennessee for years but still thinks in metres, wants to know one simple thing: how big is this job? Before you translate a single line, it helps to see how a contractor describes foundation, concrete and driveway work in its own words. For one Nashville contractor's description of those services, Learn More.

Measurements are where bilingual households lose the thread. The words are easy to look up; the units, the way numbers are grouped and the habit of writing them by hand are not. Here is how I read a concrete or foundation quote in passes, with a note at each stage on what changes when the reader thinks in Japanese.

First pass: what is being measured?

Before converting anything, sort the numbers by what they measure. A concrete quote usually mixes three kinds: area (how much ground is covered), length (an edge, a crack, a step) and depth or thickness (how deep the slab goes). Concrete itself is often ordered by volume, which is a fourth kind again. A number with no unit beside it belongs to none of these until someone says which.

I like to go through the quote with a pencil and mark each figure with a small letter: A for area, L for length, D for depth, V for volume. It looks fussy, and it takes two minutes. It also shows you straight away which numbers are missing their units, which is the most common gap in a hurried quote.

Galley proof

Before: "Driveway: 600"

After: "Driveway replacement: about 600 square feet of slab removed and poured again; thickness to be confirmed on site."

Why: a bare number tells the reader nothing until it has a unit, and the unit tells them what kind of job it is.

For a reader used to Japanese homes, area brings its own vocabulary. Floor space in Japan is commonly given in 平方メートル (heihō mētoru, square metres), and many people still picture a room by its 畳 (jō), the number of tatami mats it would hold. Land and floor area are also talked about in 坪 (tsubo), which is roughly the area of two tatami mats. None of these will appear on an American quote, but one of them is probably the picture in your parent's head.

You don't need an exact conversion for every line. What helps is one anchor: the driveway is about the size of a particular room, or a little larger than the garage floor. A comparison the reader can see will do more than a long column of converted figures.

Second pass: how numbers are grouped and written

This is the pass I enjoy most, because the trouble is visual. English groups large numbers in threes with commas: thousands, millions. Japanese groups them in fours, with 万 (man) for ten thousand. So 10,000 is 1万, and 120,000 is 12万. When someone moves a figure from an English quote into a Japanese note, the comma pulls the eye towards the wrong grouping.

Galley proof

Before: 12,000 → 12万 (written in a translated note)

After: 12,000 → 1万2千 (ichiman nisen, "twelve thousand")

Why: the commas sit in threes and the Japanese groups sit in fours, so the slip moves the figure by a factor of ten.

There is a second, quieter problem: full-width and half-width digits. When numbers are typed in Japanese text, they sometimes come out in full-width form (１２０) rather than the ordinary half-width form (120). On a phone screen the difference is easy to miss, but a full-width figure pasted into an English email or a spreadsheet can behave oddly. When you send a reply to a contractor, check that every number is the plain half-width kind.

Some things to check in this pass:

• Every large number re-read in Japanese groupings if the note is for a Japanese reader
• Decimal points and commas not swapped (a habit from some European languages that sometimes turns up in notes)
• Fractions of an inch written the same way throughout
• No full-width digits in anything you send back in English

Third pass: the words for the work

Once the numbers are settled, read the nouns. Foundation and concrete work has a small core vocabulary, and most of it translates cleanly. 基礎 (kiso) is a foundation. コンクリート (konkurīto) is concrete, written in katakana with two long vowel marks. A crack is ひび (hibi), and the fuller ひび割れ (hibiware) is what you would see in a repair description. 補修 (hoshū) means repair in the sense of mending something that already exists.

The gaps are in the everyday words for an American house. There is no single Japanese word that matches an American driveway as neatly. 駐車場 (chūshajō) means a parking space or a car park, so a direct translation can sound as though the family runs a parking lot. A short description, "the concrete area in front of the garage", often works better than a dictionary match.

Galley proof

Before: 基礎の修理 (kiso no shūri, "foundation repair")

After: 基礎のひび割れ補修 (kiso no hibiware hoshū, "repair of cracks in the foundation")

Why: the longer version says what is wrong as well as what will be done, which is exactly what a worried homeowner wants to read.

When you are unsure of a technical term, leave it in English and explain it in a short phrase. A note that says "the contractor will check the 'footing' (the base under the wall)" is more honest than a confident guess. The contractor can explain anything structural; your job is to make sure the question reaches them in clear words.

Fourth pass: dates, notes and labels on site

The last pass covers the handwritten side of a job, which is where my own interest in how words look on paper comes in. Concrete work brings practical instructions: when the crew arrives, whether cars need to be moved, how long to keep off new concrete. A good contractor will tell you these things. The risk is in how they are written down at home.

A note stuck to the fridge in a mix of languages is easy to misread a week later. Dates are the usual casualty. Japanese order runs year, month, day, while American order runs month, day, year, so "4/5" means something different depending on who wrote it. Write the month as a word in English, or use 月 and 日 (gatsu and nichi) in Japanese, and the problem goes away.

Galley proof

Before: "Don't park on it for a while."

After: "Keep the car off the new driveway until the date the contractor gives us; ask again if it rains before then."

Why: "a while" means a different length of time to every reader, and the person who knows the right answer is the contractor.

If you label anything during the job, such as a box of things moved out of the garage or a key left for the crew, write it large and simply, in the language of the person who will read it. A neat katakana label is lovely; a label the crew can't read is not much use to them. Two lines, one in each language, solve both problems.

A few habits for this pass:

• Write instructions down while the contractor is still there, and read them back
• Keep one sheet for the job, in both languages, rather than notes on several scraps
• Put the date in full on every note
• Ask the contractor anything about timing or the work itself, and record their answer exactly

The final read

If there is one check that matters most, it is this: every number in the quote has a unit, and the person who owns the house can picture what that number means. Get that right and the rest of the translation becomes ordinary careful reading.

The concrete will be poured once; a misread figure can follow the family around for years.