世論 What Japan Thinks

According to a survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into online dictionaries, the satisfied, dissatisfied and on the fence online translation tool users each make up significant groups.

Demographics

Between the 16th and 19th of April 2012 1,099 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 21.1% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 11.9% aged sixty or older.

I recently came across a case where the Japanese user appears to have been satisfied, but the native English speaker on the other end was quite dissatsified with the output. Scroll down a page or two, and you’ll see comments like:

Oh, sorry, I should give up for now. Ha ha. Without looking at the Japanese, I can’t really figure out exactly what is being said! Maybe Kaneishi will have things ready soon. I’m happy to use my Kanji reader to do the short things like this. No problem, as long as I have the Japanese script to copy onto the Kanji reader website.

Research results

First, the sample was asked if they used online translation tools from their computers (not mobile phones); 9.7% said they often did, and 52.2% said they sometimes did. These 681 users were first asked what languages they translated from and to. 80.3% used English to Japanese, 69.5% Japanese to English, then a huge gap to 6.0% doing Chinese to Japanese, 5.1% Korean to Japanese, 4.7% Japanese to Chinese, 4.4% Japanese to Korean, and 4.3% both from Japanese to French and French to Japanese.

Q1: How satisified are you with the accuracy of the translations? (Sample size=681)

Totally satisfied	2.9%
Satisfied	38.5%
Can’t say either way	30.4%
Dissatisfied	23.6%
Totally dissatisfied	4.6%

The article finally suggests that it might be interesting to see a breakdown for satisfaction by individual language pairs, to see how well the state of the art has progressed for each language.