I’m talking about written text. Even for humdrum stuff like business emails, the lack of nuance and contextual understanding is crippling for JP/EN translation.
I actually had a start-up idea circa 2005 for translating business emails between Japanese and English. The idea (and please feel free to use it for whatever it's worth now) was to constrain the emails into the set phrases derived from MINNA NO NIHONGO, where you could only choose the sentence type and fill in the nouns and verbs.
eg:
“Do you think <NOUN> will <VERB>?”
would be translated to:
“<NOUN>は<VERB>でしょうか?”
and back in the other direction. The emails would be constructed from a sequences of various sentence types.
It would be a sort of highly constrained “business language”, but of course with a nice UI(!)
Ha, OK -- "prepared" written text maybe? "Formal" written text? I've never come across people paying for translating business emails. :)
I'm talking about the vast majority of what translating companies are paid to translate -- articles, contracts, reports, specifications, meeting summaries, and so on -- whatever you want to call that. Thanks for helping me to clarify.
