Translation: Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese
Translation is tested in both directions: Japanese-to-English (和文英訳) and English-to-Japanese (英文和訳). The marker is checking whether the meaning survives, not whether every word is matched. Most lost marks come from tense, subject, and word order, not from unknown vocabulary.
Japanese to English
- Find the main verb and decide its subject. Japanese often leaves the subject out; supply we, people, you, or use a passive.
- Japanese noun phrases often need to become English verbs: 「〜の増加」 becomes increase.
- Decide the tense from the Japanese ending, not from the topic: 「〜した」 past, 「〜している」 present progressive or present perfect, 「〜していた」 past progressive or past perfect.
- Keep the Japanese logic order if English allows it; otherwise restructure into subject–verb–object.
Worked example
「この問題は、私たちが思っていたよりも深刻であることが分かった。」 Model: “It turned out that the problem was more serious than we had thought.” Reasoning: 「分かった」 is best rendered as it turned out because the discovery is the point. 「思っていた」 describes a state earlier than the discovery, so past perfect had thought. 「よりも」 requires the comparative more serious than. A literal “The problem was found to be serious than we thought” fails on the comparative and the tense.
English to Japanese
- Reorder into Japanese SOV; put the verb last.
- Render relative clauses as modifiers before the noun (〜する〜) or split the sentence in two.
- Use the passive only where Japanese would naturally use it.
Traps
- Word-for-word translation that keeps English word order.
- Dropping articles and plurals in Japanese-to-English.
- Translating idioms literally.