Translate a business plan into Japanese

Register and style: what a Japanese reader notices first

A Japanese business plan (事業計画書) keeps a single style throughout: either the polite desu/masu form (です・ます) or the neutral written de aru style (である). Switching between the two within a section is the slip a Japanese investor or partner spots fastest, often before any terminology issue.

The company's "we" usually becomes 当社 (our company) or the humbler 弊社; what matters is not alternating. Job titles rarely map one to one: 代表取締役 is the representative director of a Japanese joint-stock company (株式会社), not automatically the equivalent of a CEO, managing director or Geschäftsführer. Foreign legal forms such as Ltd, GmbH or SAS are often left in Latin letters, sometimes with a short gloss.

Finance vocabulary mixes kanji and katakana: 売上高 for revenue, 損益計算書 for the income statement, but キャッシュフロー, ビジネスモデル and スタートアップ borrowed from English. Some concepts exist in both forms; consistency across the document matters more than the choice.

Figures, fiscal years and counters

Japanese groups large numbers in tens of thousands: 万 (10,000) and 億 (100 million). Revenue of 2.4 million euros reads 240万ユーロ; a funding need of 150 million yen, 1億5000万円. Tables commonly keep Western notation with a thousands comma and decimal point (1,200,000). If your source uses a decimal comma, as in French, German or Spanish, a misread separator can shift an amount by a factor of a thousand: check this first.

• Fiscal year: many Japanese companies close their books in March, and 年度 often suggests an April–March year. Write "financial year ending 31 December 2026" rather than "FY2026".
• Dates: the expected order is year, month, day (2026年4月1日); a bare "04/05" in a timeline is ambiguous.
• Counters: Japanese has one plural form but uses classifiers. "120 customers" becomes 120社 for companies and 120名 for people. If your source never says which, the classifier is a guess.

Fonts and layout: text without spaces

Japanese runs without spaces between words and can break lines almost anywhere, except before marks such as 。 or 、. Table cells and chart labels fill differently as a result: a katakana term like マーケティング戦略 (marketing strategy) takes a lot of width, while a kanji sentence may be more compact than the original.

• Fonts: a Latin typeface such as Garamond has no Japanese glyphs, so the software substitutes another font. Line spacing can change and push a paragraph onto the next page.
• Punctuation: full-width marks (、。（）「」) sit beside Latin digits and acronyms such as EBITDA or KPI.
• Emphasis: italics are not part of Japanese typography and look odd on kanji; bold or 「」 brackets read more naturally.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not

Your business plan goes to Métis, the finance specialist engine. Upload a Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, plain text, Markdown, HTML, RTF or CSV file and you get the same format back, layout included. For a typical document such as a business plan of around 7,000 words (25 pages), the translation arrives within minutes and stays in your client area.

Japanese carries a surcharge (a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word rate). The Professional level suits a plan you will send to investors or partners; Premium adds a cross-review after the most advanced engine.

What Manuce does not do:

• it cannot read a scanned PDF (an image with no selectable text);
• it does not produce sworn or certified translations. If a Japanese bank, authority or visa application requires one, check with the recipient before ordering.

Preparing the file and checking the Japanese version

1. Start from the source file (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) or a PDF with selectable text.
2. Remove ambiguity in the source: "in thousands of euros" rather than a bare "k€", and spell out local accounting terms that have no direct Japanese counterpart instead of leaving an acronym.
3. Decide on currency: if you want yen equivalents, add them to the source. Conversion is a choice of rate and date, not translation.
4. Use the free sample on a paragraph containing your brand name and key terms: that is where you see whether the name stays in Latin letters or appears in katakana.
5. After delivery, check table figures, a single style (です or である), fiscal years and glyph display in the PDF, with no empty boxes. For a funding round, a read-through by a Japanese speaker remains sensible.

In practice

1. Upload your business plan (Word, Excel, PowerPoint or a text-based PDF).
2. Review the quote based on the exact word count and read the free translated paragraph.
3. Choose the level that fits the purpose and pay.
4. Download the Japanese file in its original format.
5. Check figures, fiscal years, style and fonts before sending.