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”)
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I’m inclined to agree with the other commenters who are saying that it’s more about the trends of the era when those loanwords came into use more than anything else. There are awkward phonetic transliterations like [德謨克拉西 (démókèlāxī)](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BE%B7%E8%AC%A8%E5%85%8B%E6%8B%89%E8%A5%BF) that get dropped for more convenient words, and there are others that stick around. Other Chinese languages pick up phonetic English loanwords too, I’ve heard that Shanghainese is supposed to have a lot of them. Loanwords can be picked up from languages other than English too, for example, Taiwanese Hokkien has several from Japanese.
During the Meiji restoration and through WWII, the Japanese seemed to prefer coining new words using kanji rather than doing phonetic translations, which is called [和製漢語 (wasei-kango)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-kango). A bunch of these have made their way back into Chinese too, so it’s possible that some of the conceptually translated Chinese words you’re describing were actually coined in Japanese first.
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