Nami Enterprises

Why use a professional?

Professional interpreters

It is unfortunately a common misconception that anyone with some foreign language skills can do an acceptable job of facilitating conversation between speakers of different languages. Far too often, however, meetings using amateur interpreters result in dropped and misconstrued information that can have disastrous consequences for your business, in terms of both relationships and the bottom line. Interpreting is a skill that requires a great deal of training and experience to master. Because a good professional interpreter aims at communicating every piece of information uttered during the meeting, he or she must maintain an astonishing level of concentration, plus remain constantly aware of cultural appropriateness so as to convey each message with both accuracy and grace in the target language. Finally, the professional interpreter strives to become virtually invisible, so that you feel that you are really communicating directly with your counterpart. Because of this, the interpreter will not embellish upon your message with his own ideas or opinions-this is extremely important, because this ensures that you are still in control of your own message. Embellishment is one of the most common and potentially damaging habits of amateur interpreters!

Too often, companies opt to simply use someone in their office that "speaks Japanese" rather than go to the trouble and expense of hiring a professional interpreter. The scenario usually goes something like this:

"Hey, Bob, you speak Japanese, right? Can you interpret for our meeting today? It doesn't have to be perfect, we just want to make sure we get the general idea across."

And so, poor unsuspecting Bob gets thrown into the minefield of meeting interpreting, which he is most likely not equipped to handle. Perhaps Bob impressed everyone last week when he was able to order sushi at the company dinner party. Or, Bob may have a Japanese wife, which makes people automatically assume that he is completely fluent in Japanese (fluency is included in the marriage certificate package, of course). To those who do not speak Japanese, Bob may very well seem fluent. He calls his wife in Japanese to tell her what time he will be home for dinner, he can perform standard greetings and discuss a few daily-use topics such as today's weather and his favorite hobby. Unfortunately, these achievements will not be of much use to our friend Bob today. Of course he will do his best, but he is clearly out of his league in this level of business conversation. In the end, he drops a good deal of the content, conveys several concepts incorrectly in Japanese (which you will not be able to detect, since your Japanese counterparts will just smile and nod politely anyway). In addition, our well-meaning Bob also added things here and there because he "knew what you meant to say" or felt that you left something out. It is extremely difficult for an amateur interpreter to resist the temptation to embellish upon what each party is saying. It is a natural human inclination to want to be part of the conversation. Unfortunately, you don't know what Bob is saying, and he might be including things that you may want to avoid saying at this stage in your negotiations. The worst part about all this is that you may not really be aware of what disasters await you as a result of this amateur interpreting until further down the road. At that point, it may be very difficult or impossible to recover that lost ground.

The moral of the story is this: Saving the effort and money by not hiring a professional interpreter up front can turn out to cost your business considerably more in money and grief down the road.
Millions of dollars have been lost in bad business deals just because a company did not want to spend a few hundred dollars on hiring a professional interpreter each time they had a meeting.

If you have a meeting scheduled with current or prospective Japanese clients, it is always worth it to hire a professional interpreter. If the business is important to you, you cannot afford not to do it right.

One final note: professional interpreting is an extremely demanding mental activity, so please be sure to schedule regular breaks for long meetings! Your interpreter is not a machine, and he or she will be able to provide you with the best possible service if you allow time to mentally recharge. You will find that everyone in the meeting will benefit from this as well.

Professional translators

Why use a professional translator? It is unfortunately a common misconception that anyone with some foreign language skills can do an acceptable job of digesting the source text and putting it into the target language. Far too often, however, amateur translations result in misconstrued concepts that lead to faulty business decisions. Translation is a lot more difficult than it looks!

This amateur translator is usually someone working within an organization whose limited knowledge of the language is deemed “good enough” by some monolingual superiors. When the management of this organization receives a document in Japanese, they immediately approach this person to help out. It goes something like this:

The boss says, “Here, Judy, you lived in Japan for 2 years, right? See if you can translate this for us. It doesn’t have to be perfect, we just want the general idea.”
Judy, not wanting to let everyone down, especially with her annual review and possible promotion coming up, decides to take a stab at it. Poor Judy really does try her best, but there are several things she was not able to grasp, so she guessed in those parts. “Oh well,” she says to herself, “they said they just wanted the general idea, so it probably doesn’t matter.”

Unfortunately, it usually does matter. Sometimes the parts that were either left out or mistranslated by the amateur translator are not discovered until the deal has been completed. The moral of the story is this: Saving money on the translation up front can turn out to cost your business considerably more in money and grief down the road. Millions of dollars have been lost in bad business deals just because a company did not want to spend a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars on a professional translation.

A professional translator is a skilled, experienced bilingual wordsmith. He or she is both an artist and a technician, carefully crafting each sentence to correctly reflect the content and nuance of the source document, while at the same time adhering to writing standards in the target language and culture. If you have a document that needs to be translated, it is always worth it to use a professional translation service.