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

For the Chinese writing system, all the letters are tied to certain meanings. So even if you just need to mimic the sounds of a foreign word, the result is bound to have some meaning on it, intentional or not. So how do you approach this? It’s preferable to try to translate the concept entirely (camera -> 照相机). However, there are bound to be times when this won’t work because there’s no proper equivalent. In that case you would try to mimic the sounds (Coca-Cola -> 可口可乐).

The situation is different for the adjacent countries like Japan and Korea. Their writing system has the phonetic letters available (Japanese: hiragana/katakana, Korean: hangul) in addition to the Chinese-based letters (Japanese: kanji, Korean: hanja). Like the Latin alphabet, the phonetic letters don’t carry any meaning, but just the sound.

So if you want to bring in a new word from another country, you have much more flexibility – you can either translate the concept with the Chinese letters and display it as is or with the phonetic letters, or you can just forgo the concept and transliterate with the phonetic letters directly.

In the case of the former, the Japanese word for camera is しゃしんき (写真機 *shashinki*) and Korean, 사진기(寫眞機 *sajingi*). In the case of the latter, the same word in Japanese is カメラ *kamera* and in Korean, 카메라 *kamera*.

So why does it feel like the latter is happening a lot more? That’s more of the “style of the times” thing. In the old days (from around 19th to mid-20th century) the general populace were very unfamiliar with English. Thus it was better to translate the concept to get the meaning across. But as English made inroads, more and more people didn’t mind just importing the words into the vocabulary wholesale. The camera existed long enough to see the preference shift from one way to another.