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The Asian languages, particularly Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, represent a significant part of the translation industry in the United States, especially on the West Coast. Some agencies specialize in only Asian languages or even just one or two of them. Still others make the brunt of their money from these languages. Yet, despite the appeal of their lucrative potential and the need for them in business, many translators and those who work with translators know very little about these languages. This article is intended to fill that gap.
First, a brief clarification. Although Asia certainly includes India, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, as well as Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and numerous other fascinating and important nations, this article will address only those languages which fall in the Sino group (Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Burmese, Thai, Laotian, etc.) or the Altaic group (Korean and Japanese; Turkish is omitted for geographical reasons). Apologies to the numerous other languages of the region, but they come from different families and are not relevant to this discussion. For convenience, I’ll refer to the above languages as the Asian languages. Please also note that when I refer to European languages, I mean those members of the Romance, Germanic, or Baltic-Slavic families. This excludes Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish, whose origins have nothing to do with PIE (Proto Indo-European).
Modern Asian languages are much older than most modern Indo-European languages. French, Spanish and the other Romance languages all find their origins in Latin. English, German, and the other Germanic languages find their origins in Proto-germanic. Baltic-Slavic is the original form of the current Baltic languages and Slavic tongues which include Russian and others. Note that all the proto-forms of these languages date from roughly 100-200 C.E., or even more recent.
Not so with the Asian languages. We have extant examples of Chinese which date from three thousand years B.C.E. (half a millennium before the Giza pyramids were built). Classical Japanese texts date from the very beginning of the Japanese writing system around 700 C.E. And the language itself is considerably older.
Moreover, while Chinese and its sisters are clearly descended from something generally called Proto-Sinic, Japanese and Korean are Altaic, tracing their roots back to a hypothetical ancestor called Ur-Altaic. In other words, Asian languages stem from a completely different part of the language family tree than do European languages. And, as a note, Japanese has virtually no linguistic connections with Chinese except for the use of Chinese characters and the adoption of some ancient Chinese idioms and adages. Knowing Japanese will help you learn Chinese about as much as knowing English will help you learn Arabic.
I realize that I am ignoring the other fourteen language families in the world, including Dravidian, Amerindian, Bantu, Semitic, and the others. This is not to slight or ignore their importance, but instead to keep the focus of this article on a comparison between Asian and Indo-European languages, the former being too common in the current translation market to be ignored, the latter being represented by three most commonly spoken languages in this hemisphere (English, Spanish, and French), and encompassing the majority of European languages. Similar material involving the differences between Arabic and European languages could and should be written, but I am not the person to do so.
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