American language translation companies do a lot of business translating Asian languages, which present special characteristics – and special challenges for translators.

“Asian languages lack much of the linguistic equipment we take for granted in an Indo-European tongue. For instance, neither Japanese nor Chinese distinguish the singular or plural unless absolutely necessary, they have no verb tenses as we are used to them in say French or Russian, no gender, cases, articles, or declensions as we know them in English, Spanish, or German.

There is no plural form for a noun like ‘cat’. You simply say ‘cat’ (which means one or many); the number of cats, if important, is revealed either through context or the addition of a number with its counter (a part of speech used to identify what is being counted). Similarly, there is no gender (masculine, feminine, or neutral). In Spanish, the word ‘cat’ is ‘gato’ and is masculine. No such distinction exists in Japanese, Chinese, or other Asian languages.

Words hardly ever change in Asian languages (they are uninflected, to be technical about it). Unlike German or Russian, where nouns and adjectives constantly change endings depending on what they are doing in a sentence; unlike Spanish or French, which have numerous verb conjugations and three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative); unlike most European languages, which have many forms of the word ‘the’; Asian languages require no such changes.”