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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For historical reasons (e.g. trade, occupation), Japanese language has always had lots of foreign influence and loan words. (Chinese being the biggest foreign influence!)
Introducing a concept by phonetically interpreting the sound is something Japanese speakers are accustomed to and can easily welcome.
This is not the case in China, where the level of education and exposure to the West is very low, especially in rural areas and prior to the explosive growth of the last 20 years. To make things understandable even for grandmas, we have constructions like 照相机, photo-taking machine.
Maybe more importantly, notice that 照相机 uses only pre-existing Chinese vocabulary, but to localize anything in Japanese you almost always have to introduce new vocabulary, which is done by borrowing from other languages. Using your example, a photo-taking machine using no new vocabulary in Japanese would be 写真を撮る機械. This is too long. To make this shorter, we must introduce new vocabulary. Option 1 is to borrow from Chinese and try a Chinese-based construction such as 撮真機/撮絵機. Option 2 is to try an English-based construction such as カメラ. In both cases, you need to teach the population about the new vocabulary.
In the case of Chinese, 照相机 is equivalent to 写真を撮る機械, where no vocabulary was created.
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