Japanese, Chinese, and Malay are three important and widely spoken Asian languages. They have a huge number of speakers and enjoy massive recognition around the globe. Chinese being one of the most popular languages with billions of speakers is an Asian language that enjoys massive popularity all over the world. 

The Japanese language comes from Japan which is one of the world’s top economies and a hub for appliances, electronics, and automobiles. Everyone knows how Japanese products are highly priced and in demand. 

Malay languages have millions of speakers and translation agencies seek help through Malay translation services to address the needs and choices of the Malay people and the region where this language is spoken.

Japanese Language

Japanese is an East Asian language and it has speakers of more than 128 million. It is the national language of Japan. Japanese’s large portion of Japanese and loanwords are taken from the Chinese. These are frequently used in the modern Japanese language. A lot of words from English have also proliferated.

Japanese follows subject-object-verb sentence order and particles mark the grammatical function of words and sentence structure. There are no grammatical numbers or gender associated with nouns in Japanese. All these details are really important and significant for companies to understand and be mindful of while offering Japanese translation services.

Chinese Language

Chinese comes from the Sinitic branch of the Sino Tibetan language family. It is the world’s most spoken language. It has 1.3 billion speakers which make up around 16% of the world’s population. The Chinese language has its varieties which include traditional Chinese and modern Chinese language. 

Standard Chinese which is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin was adopted in the 1930s and it is not an official language of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China Taiwan, it is also one of the four official languages of Singapore and one of the six languages of United Nations. 

People often get confused with the Chinese language. The ancient one is Mandarin and is considered quite tough and complicated. This is why people take through Chinese traditional translation services.

Malay Language

The Malay language is an Austronesian language that is the official language of Malaysia and Singapore. It is also spoken in East Timor and a few parts of Thailand. It has 290 million speakers. More than 260 million speakers are in Indonesia alone and are named the Indonesian language across the world.

The standard and literary standard of pre-colonial Malacca and Johor Sultanates are Standard Malay also known as Court Malay. Considering the huge number of speakers, translation services are used to address the needs of the people who speak this language.

Similarities between Malay, Japanese and Chinese

  • Japanese and Chinese share this main similarity where they share similar characters. These are Kanji for Japanes and Hanzi in Chinese. These details are significant for Chinese translation services too. 
  • Moreover, both of these languages have more than half characters in common. It is interesting to note that Japan initially adopted China’s writing pattern and later it developed its own version. With the passage of time newer kanji from Japan also got incorporated into the Chinese language.
  • As for Malay and Japanese, both of these languages use reduplication for denoting plural. For instance in Malay, ‘orang-orang’ is hitobito for Japanese and that means a person in the respective languages.
  • Also, it requires an affix to construct the verb by conjugating the stem form. The Malay language states it as tertidur’ for sleep, a passive with stem ‘tidur’, however Japanese use ‘nerareru’ for sleeping with a stem.
  • It is also important to take note that the writing for numbers in Japanese is as same as in Chinese. The number writing structure is the same in both languages as in English. These details can make the process of professional Japanese translation services easy, especially for translators who understand the Chinese language and its differences.
  • Japan has been under the influence of Chinese culture for a long. Moreover, the Japanese language had no its own writing system initially and it adapted the Chinese pattern due to which the languages also share the same pattern of name order. While using the full name, its last name is written before the first name.
  • Interestingly Malay and Japanese, both are gender-neutral languages. Both languages do not use gender articles. These details are important to consider for the translations and translation agencies during their contribution to professional Malay translation services.
  • Japanese and Malay have classifiers in common that are universal in the East Asian languages. The classifier gets in use with a number and further reflects the object type as depicted by the noun

For example

A cat is neko ippiki and seekor kucing. Hiki and ekor here are for animals.

  • It is interesting to note that Malay and Japanese don’t mark plurals like there is a practice in English with the -s suffix. A noun is taken as a plural in this context. Sentences get completed with pronouns and subjects in formal Malay.

Final words

Chinese, Japanese, and Malay are three important languages that represent the three mega cultures of Asia. All these countries contribute greatly to the world’s economy. Therefore are hugely in demand for translation services. All these languages also share some similarities and have loanwords from each other languages.