# Japanese Translation Services

> Japanese translation services for documents from Japan, such as the koseki and the juminhyo, by native human translators. Certified for USCIS.

https://roxotranslations.com/japanese-translation/

Roxo Translations offers Japanese translation services for documents from Japan and for documents that go to Japan, to and from English, Portuguese and other languages. Every translation is done by a human translator, native in the target language, and reviewed by a second one, never by machine translation.

Send a photo or scan of the document, see the price and the deadline instantly, and receive the translation as a PDF. For the United States it comes certified and accepted by USCIS; for Brazil it can be a sworn translation into Portuguese, valid nationwide.

- Japanese to English and English to Japanese
- Certified for USCIS or sworn for use in Brazil
- Instant online quote and fast delivery

## Where Japanese is spoken and where your translation is accepted

Japanese is the language of Japan, spoken by more than 120 million people. Outside Japan, the largest communities of Japanese origin are in Brazil, where immigration began in 1908, in the United States, mainly in Hawaii and California, and in Peru. A Japanese document can be asked for by an immigration office, a university or an employer on the other side of the world, and the destination decides the type of translation.

| Where | What you need |
|---|---|
| United States: USCIS, courts, universities and employers | [Certified translation](https://roxotranslations.com/certified-translation/) into English, with the signed statement of accuracy and notarization included |
| Brazil: notary offices, universities and public agencies | [Sworn translation](https://roxotranslations.com/pt/traducao-juramentada/) into Portuguese, signed by a public sworn translator and valid nationwide |
| Japan: city halls, immigration and employers | Ask the receiving authority which format it accepts: we tell you the options before quoting, including the [Hague apostille](https://roxotranslations.com/apostille/) when it applies |
| Japanese consulates, visas and family registration | The translation into the language the authority asks for, with the apostille on the original when it is required |

## Japanese language pairs we translate

These are the language pairs with Japanese that we translate today, in both directions.

- [Japanese to Arabic](https://roxotranslations.com/arabic-translation/)
- [Japanese to English](https://roxotranslations.com/english-translation/)
- [Japanese to Italian](https://roxotranslations.com/italian-translation/)
- [Japanese to Portuguese](https://roxotranslations.com/portuguese-translation/)
- [Japanese to Russian](https://roxotranslations.com/russian-translation/)
- [Arabic to Japanese](https://roxotranslations.com/arabic-translation/)
- [English to Japanese](https://roxotranslations.com/english-translation/)
- [Italian to Japanese](https://roxotranslations.com/italian-translation/)
- [Portuguese to Japanese](https://roxotranslations.com/portuguese-translation/)
- [Russian to Japanese](https://roxotranslations.com/russian-translation/)

Need a pair that is not on the list? Talk to us: we answer within one hour, 7 days a week.

## Japanese translation services: scripts, names and era dates

Japanese has no national variants like English or Spanish, but its documents follow rules of their own: three scripts in the same line, names in a different order, years counted by imperial era and seals in place of signatures. A good translation handles each of them and keeps every detail of the original.

- Scripts: a single text mixes kanji, the characters that came from Chinese, with hiragana and katakana, the two Japanese syllabaries, so Japan can be written 日本 in kanji, にほん in hiragana or ニホン in katakana.
- Names: the family name comes first, as in Yamada Taro, and the names of foreigners are written in katakana, so Maria Silva becomes マリア・シルバ. The translation goes back to the spelling of the passport and keeps it the same in every document.
- Dates: documents count the years by imperial era. Reiwa began on May 1, 2019, so 2026 is Reiwa 8 (令和8年). The translation keeps the era date with the Gregorian year beside it, in the order year, month and day.
- Numbers and seals: large numbers are grouped by ten thousand (man, 万), so 100万 is one million, and many documents carry a red personal or official seal (hanko or inkan) instead of a signature, which the translation describes.
- Documents: the family register (koseki) records the births, marriages and deaths of a family and comes as a full copy (koseki tohon) or an extract (koseki shohon), and the residence certificate (juminhyo) shows the address registered at the city hall. The translation reproduces every stamp, seal and note.

## The history of the Japanese language

Japanese belongs to a small family of its own, the Japonic languages, together with the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa. For centuries it had no writing: Chinese characters reached Japan around the 5th century, by way of Korea, and the oldest surviving Japanese book, the Kojiki, was written with them in 712.

Between the 9th and the 10th centuries, scribes simplified the Chinese characters into two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. In the early 11th century, the court lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, one of the first novels in the world. After 1868, in the Meiji era, the speech of Tokyo became the basis of the standard language, and in 1867 the missionary James Curtis Hepburn had already published the dictionary that gave its name to the most used romanization.

Today Japanese has more than 120 million speakers, and the government keeps an official list of 2,136 kanji for everyday use. On June 18, 1908, the ship Kasato Maru arrived in Santos with the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil, and the country now has the largest community of Japanese origin outside Japan. Since the late 1980s many of their descendants have gone to work in Japan, and documents travel in both directions.

## We also translate other languages

- [Hindi translation](https://roxotranslations.com/hindi-translation/)
- [Portuguese translation](https://roxotranslations.com/portuguese-translation/)
- [Russian translation](https://roxotranslations.com/russian-translation/)
- [Dutch translation](https://roxotranslations.com/dutch-translation/)
- [Korean translation](https://roxotranslations.com/korean-translation/)