Today I discovered a website called Twiyaku which offers Japanese to English translation service for your tweets. The provider mygengo.com guarantees that they have over 900 professional translators to perform high-quality human translations of your Japanese tweets into English. This pricing scheme is as following:

Plan A:

• 25,000円/月 (monthly fee 25,000 YEN or $276.95 U.S. dollars)
• 3ツイート翻訳/日 (3 tweet translations per day)
• 単一アカウント利用 (used by single account only)
• 12時間以内の納品保証 (guarantee translation within 12 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 3円/文字 (additional translation: 3 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan B:

• 50,000円/月 (monthly fee 50,000 YEN or $553.9 U.S. dollars)
• 7ツイート翻訳/日 (7 tweet translations per day)
• 複数アカウント利用 (used by multiple accounts)
• 12時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 12 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 2.7円/文字(additional translation: 2.7 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan C:

• 100,000円/月 (monthly fee 100,000 YEN or $1107.8 U.S. dollars)
• 15ツイート翻訳/日 (15 tweet translations per day)
• 複数アカウント利用(used by multiple accounts)
• 4時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 4 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 2.5円/文字 (additional translation: 2.5 YEN per word per Japanese character)

2010-6-24 Update: thanks Robert Laing from mygengo.com for pointing out the price mistakes in additional translation)

The service is still in beta right now, so there is a 20% discount for the monthly fee. They even provide a web-service API for easy integration from your companies internal CMS or marketing workflow to their translation engine.

My comment: this is outrageously expensive! 100,000 YEN per month for 15 translated tweets per day is very unreasonable to me, realizing that one tweet is only as long as 140 characters. Also, I am not very confident that these people are capable of translating emotion, attitude and tone of voice (happy, professional, angry, annoyed), as well as keeping a consistent presentation that reflects your corporate image. I am assuming this pricing scheme is targeting mostly corporate clients, who must be very concerned about and protective to their corporate online presence.

In my previous post  ”Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That“, I talked about a book「英語でTwitter！」that teaches Japanese to tweet about their unsuccessful weight loss progress in English. I thought the idea was quite adorable but never for professional purpose. However a good discussion with my Japanese friends made me realize that, it is not that some Japanese people are not capable to writing perfectly understandable English tweets and articles, but it is the fear of public embarrassment when making a single mistake on the Internet, where everything is so open to the eyes of the world, and where published data is irreversible once it’s out in the wild. This psychology might be explained by 恥の文化 (the Shame Society).

Another thought is that Japanese corporates has fallen victim in the Internet social marketing strategy invented by the western world. In the North America, from giant corporates to local bakery and cafe, most of them now have at least one social network presence: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google…etc. Examples: a bakery tweets when fresh bun is just taken out of the oven. Dell and Comcast has dedicated customer service team to deal with angry tweets about their products and services (this article is written in 2008). Now when the younger generation in Japan are picking up the trendy social networks from the west, the Japanese companies has to follow the food and quickly set up their online presence, even if that means an ad-hoc integration of tweet translation to the existing public relation procedures.

As a consequence of such Internet social marketing strategy, the western corporates begin to hire Online Community Managers, who are special people dedicated to handle tweets, social networks, public discussions and blogs, and all kinds of PR to maintain the online corporate image. Even in the western world, such a kind of industry is still emerging and experimental. I will continue to observe how the Japanese corporates will move beyond ad-hoc tweet translations, and continue to evolve into similar dedicated community management concept.

Credit: the source tweet from which I learned about this service is posted by @HirokoTabuchi.