Eli5: Why does it seem like Japanese often translates from English phonetically (camera = カメラ ‘kamera’) while Chinese seems to translate conceptually (照相机 ‘zhao xiang ji’ is literally “photo taking machine”)

Question

Eli5: Why does it seem like Japanese often translates from English phonetically (camera = カメラ ‘kamera’) while Chinese seems to translate conceptually (照相机 ‘zhao xiang ji’ is literally “photo taking machine”)

In: Other

Answer 1

The Chinese characters used in both written Chinese and Japanese are mostly complete words (eg. 机 machine).

However written Japanese has had additional phonetic characters (kana) since 800AD, Chinese only got phonetic characters in the early 1900s.

So there is a history of being able to write words out phonetically in Japanese, while in Chinese the tradition is to make a new word out of existing words.

Sometimes they do it phonetically in Chinese though, for example Canada is 加拿大, literally increase hold big, pronounced Jiānádà.