Problems of Translation from Japanese into Turkish
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
There are comparative scientific studies available on Japanese and Turkish among various world languages. However, there are not many comparative studies in the field of translation and linguistics between these two languages. According to common belief, Japanese and Turkish belong to the Altaic language group. Works on this topic belong to Miller and Tekin. Both scholars identify proto-forms for some words of these two languages based on their ancient pronunciations, and argue that through phonological evolution, these forms developed into today’s sounds, thus attempting to prove the kinship between the two languages. These works are synchronic linguistic studies.
However, when I look at the subject from the perspective of synchronic linguistic data, I see that this relationship is rather a syntactic similarity rather than a kinship. I cannot say that there is morphological or lexical commonality between the two languages.
Here, I will not make a detailed linguistic comparison of Japanese and Turkish; such a topic would exceed the purpose of our paper. In this presentation, I will only touch on:
- The phonological and lexical similarities between Japanese and Turkish,
- Syntactic similarities,
- Morphological similarities,
- The unique style of Japanese,
and I will examine the advantages and difficulties these characteristics present for Turkish native speakers in translation and language learning.