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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Chinese is a tonal language, so phonetic spellings are inevitably going to run into problems. Japanese is not tonal, so loanwords are rendered as approximate imitations of the phonetics, and that’s the easiest way for them. Chinese often adopts a Japanese loanword instead of an English one, but there are exceptions.
加拿大，蘇格蘭，瑞典，埃及, 馬來西亞
麥當勞，肯德基
Canada, Scottish, Sweden, Egypt, Malaysia
McDonald’s, KFC
The meaning and approximate transliteration match.
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