- Is it our Japanese or our product? How do we tell why Japan isn't converting?
- Rule out the Japanese first, because it is the cheaper problem to find and fix. Have a native reader go through the five to seven screens between your Japanese landing page and a completed signup. If nothing there costs you trust, the cause is something other than the translation: price, product fit or channel. Your analytics alone cannot answer this.
TL;DR
When Japan underperforms, teams tend to argue about the product, because the product is what they can measure. Language problems do not show up as a separate line in your dashboard. They show up as visitors who leave quietly. Check the Japanese in a fixed order: the signup path, then legal and pricing pages, then help content and automated emails. Only when those read like they were written for a Japanese buyer is it worth reopening price, features or go-to-market.
Key Takeaways
- Separate the two causes before you spend on either. A product rethink costs quarters. A language check of the path to signup costs days.
- Your analytics shows where people leave, not why. A drop at the pricing page looks the same whether the price is wrong or the page reads like a machine translation.
- Read in a fixed order. Signup path first, then legal and pricing pages, then help content and automated emails.
- "No problems found" is a real result. If a native reader finds nothing that costs you trust, you have earned the right to look at price, features and channel.
Why Is It Hard to Tell a Language Problem From a Product Problem?
Because both look identical in your data: Japanese visitors arrive, and fewer of them convert than elsewhere. Nothing in a standard funnel report tells you whether a visitor left because the offer was wrong or because the page made your company look careless.
A buyer who reads awkward Japanese on a checkout page does not file a complaint. They close the tab. A buyer who finds the product too expensive does the same thing. From HQ, both become the same bar on the same chart, and the team that owns the product usually gets asked to explain it.
This is why the order matters. The language check is faster and cheaper than any product change, and it removes one explanation completely. If you skip it, you can spend a long time adjusting price or features for a market that was never reading a convincing version of your offer.
What Should We Check First?
The path to signup, read in Japanese by someone who reads Japanese natively. That is usually five to seven screens: the landing page, the pricing page, the signup or demo form, the confirmation screen and the first email.
Ask the reader to go through it as a buyer would, without your English version open next to it, and to stop at every point where they would hesitate. You are not asking "is this translated correctly?" You are asking "would a Japanese buyer trust this company with their data and their budget after reading this?"
Typical findings on this path are English left on a form or a button, field labels that do not fit Japanese names and addresses, and calls to action that are literal translations and read as pushy or vague. Each one is small. Together they tell the buyer the company has not really arrived in Japan.
How Do We Diagnose It Step by Step?
Use the table below in order, and stop at the first row where you find a real problem. Fixing an earlier stage changes what happens at every later one, so there is little value in diagnosing the product while the signup path still has problems.
| Step | What to read | What a problem looks like | Read more |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Landing page to completed signup | English left on buttons or forms, literal CTAs, form fields that do not fit Japanese names or addresses | Is AI-translated Japanese good enough to launch with? |
| 2 | Legal and pricing pages | Terms, privacy policy or pricing only in English, or in Japanese that reads as translated | What we found on 10 SaaS Japanese sites |
| 3 | Help content and automated emails | Japanese site, English help center; confirmation and onboarding emails in English | The hidden cost of "good enough" Japanese |
| 4 | Score what you found | You need to compare pages, or show leadership the size of the gap | A 5-part score for Japanese localization quality |
| 5 | Nothing found in steps 1 to 3 | The Japanese reads as written for a Japanese buyer, yet conversion stays low | Reading Japan demand signals, including the silence |
Why Can't Analytics Answer This on Its Own?
Because analytics records behaviour, and the language problem is about what the visitor read. You can see that Japanese visitors leave the pricing page faster than others. You cannot see whether they left because of the number or because of the sentence above it.
Analytics is still useful here. Isolate Japanese traffic, find the page where it drops away, and give that page to the native reader first. The data tells you where to look; the reading tells you what is wrong there. Session recordings and heatmaps can narrow it further, but they still show where people scrolled and clicked, not what they thought of the copy.
What If the Japanese Is Fine?
Then you have a clean answer, and the next questions are about price, product fit and channel. That is a useful result, not a wasted check: it stops the team from rewriting copy that was never the problem.
At that point, look at what Japan was telling you before launch: who came, from where, and what they did. Look at how your price compares with the tools Japanese buyers already use, and at whether your buyers expect to buy online at all or through a partner. Those are bigger decisions, and they are easier to make once the language is no longer a possible explanation.
Who Should Do the Reading?
A native Japanese reader who was not involved in the translation, ideally someone who knows how Japanese business buyers read. The person who translated a page tends to read what they meant to write rather than what is on the screen.
An internal Japanese-speaking colleague is a reasonable start. The limits are that they may not read with a buyer's caution, and they may be reluctant to criticise work a teammate or a vendor delivered. Whoever does it, ask for specific places and reasons, not a general impression.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a language check of the signup path take?
For five to seven screens, a native reader can usually go through them carefully in a few hours. Fixing what they find takes longer, but you will know within days whether language is part of the problem.
Our Japanese was done by a professional translator. Can we skip this?
No. A correct translation can still read as foreign, and translators often never see the forms, emails and help pages that come after the landing page. The check is about the whole path a buyer reads, not the accuracy of one page.
Can we use machine translation to check our Japanese?
It can catch English left on a page, but it cannot tell you how the Japanese reads to a buyer. Translating Japanese back into English hides exactly the awkwardness you are looking for.
What if both the Japanese and the product need work?
Fix the Japanese on the signup path first. It is faster, and until it is fixed you cannot measure whether a product or pricing change made any difference in Japan.