Certified Japanese Translation in Riyadh: Documents Into and Out of Japanese

Certified Japanese translation in Riyadh: where the difficulty sits

A certified Japanese translation behaves differently from one into a European language, and the reason has little to do with how hard the language is. It is the shape of the page. A single line can use three writing systems at once. The name is ordered back to front. The date may not be a Gregorian date. The signature may not be a signature at all, but a small red seal pressed onto the paper.

Each of those forces a decision. The wrong one rarely troubles you when you collect the sealed copy; it troubles the officer who puts your translation beside another document in the file and looks for two things to match.

Three writing systems sharing one line

Japanese uses kanji, hiragana and katakana together. Kanji carry meaning, and appear in word stems, in personal and place names, and in most of the formal vocabulary on official paper. Hiragana are phonetic and handle endings and particles. Katakana are phonetic too, but are reserved in the main for borrowed words and foreign names.

That last point has an immediate effect on your file. If your Arabic name appears inside a Japanese document, it is written in katakana, carried across as sound rather than as letters. Arabic sounds do not map one to one onto the Japanese sound system: some have no exact counterpart, and vowel length may be marked or left unmarked. A single Arabic name can therefore be written several defensible ways, none of them official until somebody decides it is.

Your name in katakana: pick one form and keep it

This is the most useful thing to settle before work starts. If your name will appear in katakana, one form is chosen, recorded in writing, and used on every page of the file. Two spellings of one name is a problem even when both are correct.

The reason is mechanical. Nobody reads your documents for pleasure; they compare a name with a name, character by character. One different character, or one extra length mark, and the two pages belong to two people until proven otherwise. The same failure occurs in the other direction, when two translators each make a sensible choice about one Japanese name. Where a mismatch already sits in old paperwork, a name-matching certificate reconciles the versions.

• A clear image of your passport or Iqama showing your name in Latin letters.
• A list of every person, company and institution named in the file, as you want them to appear.
• Any earlier translation of your name into or out of Japanese, even an uncertified one.
• Full images of every page, including any phonetic reading printed above the kanji.
• The seal photographed whole, not cropped; a seal is information, not decoration.
• The body that will receive the translation, and the direction the work must run in.
• Whether that body wants the whole document or one page of it.

Family name first, and the correction a translator must not make

A Japanese name is written with the family name first and the personal name after it, the reverse of what an Arabic or English reader assumes. A translator who quietly swaps the order to make the name look familiar has changed what the document says, and the file wobbles the moment it meets a page where nobody swapped anything.

The working rule is plain. The name stays in the printed order, and the translation makes clear which part is the family name. The same applies in reverse: an Arabic name of three or four elements is carried across in full and in order.

One name in kanji, several possible readings

A Japanese name written in kanji can often be read aloud in more than one correct way. The characters carry several readings, and in personal names the choice belongs to the family rather than to a general rule, so pronunciation cannot be deduced from the characters alone. Carrying a name into Arabic or English depends on the sound, so a wrong reading produces a wrong name from the first letter onwards.

That is why the phonetic reading is asked for wherever it is printed, set in small characters above or beside the kanji. Where it is absent, the answer is not a guess: we ask for a source that already carries the name in Latin letters, such as a passport. The same restraint governs older and handwritten documents whose characters are hard to make out. The translator asks; he does not fill the gap.

Era years, seals and addresses: what must travel unchanged

Many Japanese documents carry no Gregorian year. They carry a year counted inside a named era, so the page shows the era name, the year within it, then the month and day. This is a complete official dating system, not an abbreviation, and it is common on civil documents issued from official registers and on certificates.

The translator’s position is simple: the date is carried across as printed. The era name stays, the year inside it stays, the month and day stay. Converting it into a Gregorian equivalent is a decision rather than a linguistic act, and that decision does not belong to the translator. If the receiving body wants clarification, it is added as a visible note rather than a replacement. The common failure is quiet arithmetic, leaving a stamped page that shows a number existing nowhere on the source.

On many Japanese documents a personal seal, the hanko or inkan, does the work of a handwritten signature. It is a small red circle carrying the name of its owner or of the issuing body. A translator who skips it because it is not text has removed the act of assent. It is described as a seal, with its position and whatever can be read from it. The principle behind what belongs on a certified translator’s own stamp governs the seals on the source too: a seal is described, never invented.

Japanese addresses also run the opposite way to ours, beginning with the largest unit and working down, so the line ends with what we would normally write first. Reordering one into Western shape is an editorial act, and it can produce an address that no longer matches the one on another page of the file. The order is preserved and the elements labelled where needed.

What a certified Japanese translation must carry

The table sets out the features that recur on Japanese paperwork and the commonest mistake in each.

Two directions of work, and which one Riyadh asks for more

The work runs in two directions that are not mirror images. The first is Saudi paperwork translated into Japanese: degrees and transcripts for a student, employment contracts for a seconded employee, company documents entering a commercial arrangement. The hard part is names, addresses and job titles, all written in katakana or described rather than translated. Send the university transcript for certified translation together with the degree, so names and course titles are fixed once for both.

The second direction is Japanese paperwork translated into Arabic or English for use here: papers belonging to a resident back after years abroad, civil documents issued from official registers, and company documents where a Japanese business has a partner in the Saudi market, alongside items such as a certified commercial registration translation. This is the direction we are asked for more often in Riyadh, because a body receiving a document here needs Arabic or English as a matter of course, whereas on the other side an English document is frequently workable without Japanese at all. Requirements differ from case to case and from body to body, and you should confirm with the receiving body before you submit.

How a Japanese file is handled at our office in Al Murasalat

1. We check the legibility of the kanji, the seals and any phonetic readings.
2. We confirm the direction and the receiving body, and say at once if a page is missing.
3. We fix the names and addresses and agree the transliterations with you in writing.
4. We translate in full and in page order, describing seals and carrying dates across unchanged.
5. Names, numbers and dates are checked a second time, separately from the running text.
6. The stamped and signed copy is collected at the office or sent electronically.
7. We keep the agreed names, so any later document comes out in the same form.

Prices are approximate, starting from 35 riyals and reaching 500 riyals depending on the document, its length and the direction of the work. The office is open Saturday to Thursday around the clock and from four in the afternoon on Friday, and there is one branch, on Abu Bakr As Siddiq Road in Al Murasalat.

The measure of a good Japanese translation is not how well it reads, but whether the person holding it can match every element to something on another page: name to name, date to date, seal to seal.