You paid a translation vendor. The files came back on time. Everything looks fine. But if no one on your side has read the whole thing as a Japanese reader, "looks fine" is all you have.
No charge, no obligation, no call required. Back within a few business days.
This is a common position to be in once the Japanese site has been live for a while. The translation is done. The invoices are paid. And the honest internal summary is: we are trusting that it's fine.
If something on the Japanese site is wrong, it lands on the person who approved the spend, and that person approved output they could not read.
I'm Munehiro Hiraki. I'm a native Japanese speaker, and I do this work myself — one reviewer reading the whole set, rather than a team splitting it up again. For nearly ten years I worked inside a payments company, handling both the fintech work and the translation, which is where I learned that the words a specialist reader trusts are not the ones a dictionary gives you.
Worth saying plainly, because it's usually the first thing people assume. In the reviews I've done, the translations came from competent professionals, and the terminology was handled by someone who understood the subject. That part was not the problem, and it is not what this review is for.
The gap is structural. Translation vendors deliver file by file. Each file can be entirely correct on its own while the set as a whole drifts apart. And because the work is split across translators and across months, no one in the process has the job of reading everything in one pass.
There's a second half to it: in a lot of projects, nobody has written down which form is your house form. When two Japanese renderings are both acceptable, each file just picks one. The drift is the predictable result of a process with no memory.
One recent review: seven files, 397 segments, roughly 11,200 source words, read end to end against the English. Everything below is from that single project.
A single file gives you no way to see any of this. Reading the whole set does.
Marked line by line in the same file you sent — so your team can put them back into your platform without retyping anything or changing how you work.
Every term that was being handled inconsistently, with one form chosen and the reason recorded. Hand it to your vendor and the next batch comes back already consistent.
A short Japanese style guide. The next batch starts where this one finished — which is the difference between fixing this once and fixing it every quarter.
Sits on top of TransPerfect · RWS · Lionbridge · Smartling · Phrase · an in-house team · or machine and AI output. Your vendor stays. Nothing about your setup has to change.
Read it the way a Japanese customer does — not file by file, but all of it in one pass. In a mature project the problems are rarely mistranslations. They're the same term rendered two ways in two files, an acronym carried in some places and not others, and sentences that are technically correct but read like they were assembled rather than written. None of that is visible in the unit the work is delivered in.
Because the gap is structural, not a question of skill. Vendors deliver per file, and each file can be right on its own while the set drifts. Nobody in the process is positioned to read across all of it, and nobody has written down which of two acceptable forms is yours. That is the gap an independent reviewer covers. It isn't a judgement on your vendor, and you don't have to replace anyone.
Often, nobody. Doing it requires reading Japanese, understanding the subject, and having time to go through everything at once. The people approving the spend usually can't read what they're approving. That is what this review is for.
Yes. The review sits on top of whatever produced the Japanese, including machine translation and AI output. Your vendor isn't replaced and your existing arrangement doesn't have to change.
No. Send the files in whatever form you already have them. Corrections come back marked in the same file, so your team can re-enter them without retyping.
Send up to 500 characters of your existing Japanese: UI strings, one page, error messages, whatever is easiest to get. That is roughly one short page of copy, or around 40 UI strings. You get back a before-and-after list with comments within a few business days. No charge, no obligation, and no call.
Send 500 characters of the Japanese you already have. I'll send back what I'd change and why, within a few business days. If the answer is that it's fine, I'll tell you that too.
500 characters is roughly one short page of copy, or around 40 UI strings. Paste it into an email, or send the file exactly as you have it.
Send 500 characters — free →