Hoping for many happy events and happenings this year, I thought about the English translation for the traditional Japanese event "Kagami-biraki."   "Kagami-biraki" is the act of breaking the lid of a sake barrel with a wooden mallet at a celebration. Having said that, you don't actually break a mirror; you break a sake barrel, so it can be called a metaphorical expression.   So,   "Kagami-biraki" = "Sake barrel breaking"   It seems best to translate it into English from this perspective. ...

At our company, where we develop machine translation engines, we collect parallel translation data across numerous fields. Recently, neural network translation engines, which are based on artificial intelligence (AI), have become mainstream, and it is possible to develop translation engines and improve translation accuracy by training them on large amounts of parallel data.   To improve translation accuracy in the tourism field, we need parallel data for the tourism field, and to improve translation accuracy in the legal field, we need parallel data for the legal field, and so...

Korean is said to be a relatively easy language to understand among foreign languages, as it shares many similarities with Japanese in terms of word order and grammar. 2020 is apparently being called the 4th Korean Wave boom, and the popularity of the Korean language is said to be rising even among high school students.   Therefore, this time, I would like to introduce Korean words that have a different word order than Japanese kanji. There are many words in Korean that originate from kanji. To give an example of the same word order as Japanese,   회…

  Happy New Year. Our company resumed operations today, Monday, January 4th. We will continue to deliver blogs and social media content about languages this year for everyone to enjoy, so we look forward to your continued support. For our first post of 2021, we will start with a topic related to Japanese. While the number of tourists coming to Japan from overseas has decreased drastically, there are still many students studying abroad and people working in Japan, so this time's theme is "For…