世論 What Japan Thinks

I rarely use online sentence translators for Japanese as they are usually pretty much useless, although of course I couldn’t live without Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC for single word lookups. This recent survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into translation sites discovers the Japanese don’t rate them much too.

Demographics

On the 29th of June 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor panel employed in private industry successfully completed an internet-based closed questionnaire. 71.5% of the sample were male, 8.2% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

Contrary to the occassional comment I get, I don’t use the output from online, or even offline, translation engines as a basis for my articles. Blame any bad grammar on not a machine or other forms of cheating, but on me alone!

I must say I enjoyed translating this one, so I hope you find the contents useful!

Research results

First off, from the original sample 236 people, or 71.5%, had used online translation sites. They were then asked which sites they used. To give you an idea of how good or bad they might be, I fed the Japanese for Q1 into each of the engines, あなたが利用したことのある翻訳サイトをお答えください。

Q1: Which translation sites have you used? (Sample size=236, multiple answer)

	Question translation	Votes	Percentage
Yahoo! Translate	Please answer it in a translation site with your having used it.	146	61.9%
Excite Translate	Please answer the translation site that you have used.	119	50.4%
Infoseek Translate	Please answer it in a translation site with your having used it.	49	20.8%
@nifty Translate	Please answer the translation site which you use.	29	12.3%
livedoor Translate	Please answer the translation site which you use.	21	8.9%
OCN Translate Service	Please answer a translation site with your using it.	19	8.1%
So-net Translate	Please answer in a translation site with your having used it.	8	3.4%
Fresh eye Translate	Please answer the translation site which you had used.	2	0.8%
Other		6	2.5%
Don’t know, don’t remember		24	10.2%

Google Translate, which would fall into the other category, gives “You are a translation of the site to answer KUDASAI.” I’m sure I’ve seen that on a T-shirt somewhere.

Excite and Fresh eye give the best translations, and Google fails miserably!

Q2: How do you mainly use these translation sites? (Sample size=236)

From foreign languages to Japanese	58.9%
From Japanese to foreign languages	22.9%
Both about the same	16.9%
Other	1.3%

When asked where they used these sites (multiple answer possible, I think) 52.1% used them at work, 47.5% at home, and an unknown amount of other answers.

For languages translated from and to, not surprisingly English was top at 95.3%, Chinese second with 19.5%, then Korean at 11.0%.

Q3: When you have a long sentence you want to translate, what do you mainly do? (Sample size=236)

Translate long sentences as is (to SQ)	61.9%
Break into clauses and translate	27.5%
Translate one or two words at a time	8.9%
Other	1.7%

Q3SQ: How correct do you think these long sentence translations are? (Sample size=146)

Correct	0.0%
Correct enough	30.8%
Not very correct	61.6%
Not at all correct	7.5%

On the other hand, for those that split the sentences into clauses, nearly two-thirds (64.6%) thought the translations were correct or correct enough.