Hiroshi Hirata

Today we have with us Mr. Hiroshi Hirata - Chief Executive Officer of My Language Japan Co., Ltd., a translation and localization company based in Tokyo, Japan.

1. First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your company’s background?
Yes, my personal background should explain it all. I was brought up in Australia and so luckily I manage to understand English. I started working as a part time interpreter while studying in college.

After graduation, I was employed by an airline to plan and sell international trips. During my days at the airline, the Bubble burst and then my entrepreneurial way of thinking became larger and larger.

To stand alone was not an easy task and I needed some more experience in different markets... apart from the airline, I decided to work for an Internet company relating to the “English market”. Almost 17 years of my career spent at those companies brought me a lot of knowledge and human contact, and finally I established “My Language Japan” in 2006.

The idea of my business is “to expand Japan to the world”.

There is so much beauty and technology in this country; however, is too closed-off because of the language.

I really hope that we can help people to expand, using all sorts of language solutions - that is the purpose of my life.

2. The global crisis has affected many mid-size translation outsourcers. However, it is also well known that the Japanese translation market is quite impermeable to the trends and movements of the Western market. Can you inform us regarding the current situation inside the Japanese market?
There was a quite big change in the translation following the world crisis. As for us, we used to handle more “foreign language-to-Japanese” translations than the other way around. These translation trends mainly stemmed from the multinational companies.

After the onset of the world crisis, these companies had been enormously downsized, and orders from major Japanese corporations decreased as well.

In their place, academic institutions (hospitals, universities, research centers, etc.) and some more domestic industries (hotels, tourism associations, etc.) have been increasing.

I am pretty sure that those major Japanese corporations which deal with exports will come back once the foreign exchange becomes more stable (around 100 yen to 1 US dollar).

3. How did you manage to survive this crisis? Did you increase your sales manpower, or did you focus on quality and "old clients"?
That was not an easy thing to do!! We had the worst six-month period, starting in October 2008. We couldn’t afford to increase any costs. I mainly tried two things.

1: Focusing on existing clients at individual level and their referrals.

2: Sending as much information regarding our company to new markets as I could, with minimum costs, and meeting as many people as I possibly could.

4. In the last interview we conducted with E. Robson, CEO of Infusion Co., Ltd., he told us that the reason why TMs such as Trados and Dejavu are not very well-known in Japan is that Japan is classically a software-developing country more than a software-localizing country. Do you agree? What percentage of your clients asks you to work with Trados?
I agree with the comment “Japan is classically a software-developing country more than a software-localizing country”. However, among the clients, whether or not software is used for translation is beside the point. What they demand is quality, turnaround, and cost. So long as we meet the clients’ expectations, it’s not a big deal.

In my experience, those clients who insist on using Trados usually do so when translating manuals that are often updated and re-issued. Some of our translators have Trados, and sometimes there are requests for them to use it, but it’s not so usual.

5. Do you feel there are any emerging translation pairs for which there is more demand recently?
Yes.
For language pairs, Chinese is definitely increasing among those organizations that can pay outsourcers.

6. What sort of checkpoints do your project managers use in order to assure quality?
There is no singular, simple road to this. We must double- and triple-check each time.

To make the workflow more efficient, I use what is known as a “preferred translator” for each client so that I don’t have to explain too much about the contents and the style guides.

7. How do you see the translation market/world in 2020?
Good question. Translation software is far more advanced than it was 10 years ago. This could become a threat to us. But on the other hand, if the technology grows at the same speed, there will also be demands growing in many other fields that we’ve never focused on. I don’t think it would hit the break-even point in the next 10 years.

8. How do you view the rising power of low rate companies from emerging countries such as China and India?
We do get offers from them quite often recently. But I think it is difficult for them to reach and close deals with traditional Japanese companies. Many Japanese are - I’m sorry to say - still somewhat closed off.

So my advice to those companies in China and India is to forge a trusting relationship with the translation houses in Japan first.

9. And what effect do they have on mid-size companies within the Japanese market?
As I mentioned above, it’s not very crucial to the massive corporate market. But it may affect the individual market through the Internet, though.

10. Do you believe that quality assurance and customer relationship management might help to tip the scales? Or do you feel there are any specific fields which draw a lot attention in translations (science, video games etc.)?
Yes, the most important issues are quality control and customer relationships. These are the keys to any industry. BUT/AND, it is also important not to wait, but to draw attention to other areas, too.

(I take hints from the traditional Japanese market.)

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