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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Japan was occupied by the United States for a few years after the end of World War 2. It was the only time it was ever occupied by a foreign power. One of the lasting effects of this occupation and the decades of trading partner relations that followed was a number of loanwords from English making their way into the Japanese language.
English is not the only language Japanese has loanwords from, though. There are a lot of Chinese loanwords in Japanese (e.g. “kanji”, “zen”) as well as from Dutch and Portuguese. The English loanwords for modern/post-WWII things are largely from the American occupation.
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.
2 reasons:
First
Because Japan has been under heavy western influence multiple times in the post industrial age, not always voluntarily, and actively copied and adapted what they saw of the west during their own technological revolutions. If you look at most of the near-cognates they tend to be post-industrial inventions or concepts.
China, by contrast, has actively fought western cultural influence tooth and nail, erasing or repackaged it where they can.
Second
as mentioned by AtroScolo Chinese is tonal which does make the dissemination of western words more difficult, though hardly impossible. I will also add that written Chinese is still pretty strongly attached to its logo graphic roots, where written words string together concepts rather than strictly sounds, while Japan developed a phonetic character set from the Chinese one more than 1000 years ago and has continued to use them, in multiple forms, ever since. This makes it easier to write foreign words into the language, not just speak them.
I think it’s also a mentality of what is best to translate something.
If you go the other way, you will notice 餃子 is translated to Dumplings (or even earlier, Chinese Perogis/Chinese Ravioli) but Japanese use “Gyoza”. The flavor 鮮甜 was translated to “Savory”, “Salty”, but Japanese decide to translate simply as “Unami”
It is only recently, with the rise in Chinese power, do you see translation by tonal. 小籠包 (lit small steamer buns) now commonly known as Xiao Long Bao, but traditionally translated as “soup dumplings”
In a way, to use tonal, is to indicate that they believe the others will just accept the origin as it is, instead of adapting. So basically, Japan was “adapting to the west”.
The only case where I think the new translation is better is Boba tea, formerly “bubble tea”. It comes from 波霸 – a Cantonese term for “busty girl”
They approach language completely differently. In Mandarin, one phoneme or word can have different meanings depending on how you stress the pronunciation.
Takw the English word ‘can’ for example. I‘m going to use capitalization and repeat letters to indicate where I’m stressing the pronunciation:
Can
cAn
caaaan
CaN
If this was Mandarin, I’ve just listed 4 totally unrelated words.
Japanese makes words out of sounds. I’m not very well-versed in the nuances, but it’s really nothing like Mandarin mechanically. You may as well ask why French and Chinese aren’t similar.
That’s not true across the board. There are examples like Coca-Cola, 可口可乐, which sounds like Coca-Cola (and means “allow mouth to be happy”). Pepsi has a similar one.
I dont know what the answer is but I would to add to some answers here that its unlikely purely a function of the properties of the language, because in South East Asia / Hong Kong there are mandarin words that are translated from English or Bahasa phonetically which are not translated as such in China (for example, bus would be usually translated as 巴士 phoneticially in Singapore but as 公共汽车 (lit. Public vehicle) in China)
I don’t know, maybe it’s that they’re different languages?
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.
In large part because English and Japanese both use phonetic alphabets. Chinese does not have a phonetic alphabet and thus phonetic translations don’t follow a set of rules.
You spell something out in katakana, and each letter has a direct and clear English translation. You have to be much more creative with Chinese to get the same effect.
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