Translate a Sales Brochure into Japanese

What changes when a brochure goes into Japanese

Japanese combines three scripts: kanji for content words, hiragana for grammatical endings and particles, and katakana for loanwords and foreign names. A tagline such as “Tailored solutions” might become お客様に合わせたソリューション, with “solution” kept in katakana, which is very common in sales copy.

What this means on the page:

• Fonts. Latin display fonts (Montserrat, Raleway, Futura and the like) have no kanji. If they stay applied to Japanese text, the software either swaps in a fallback font or shows empty boxes. Plan a Japanese typeface for both headings and body text.
• Line width. Japanese often takes less horizontal space than European languages, but complex characters need a decent point size to stay legible. A box that looked full may look sparse, or overflow once you enlarge the type.
• Line breaks. There are no spaces between words, so a line can break almost anywhere. Japanese rules still forbid starting a line with 。, 、 or ー, and a katakana word split across two lines in a narrow column hurts a heading.
• Italics. They don't exist in Japanese typography. Words italicised in the source read better in bold or inside 「」 brackets.

Register, numbers and Japanese conventions

A brochure addresses a prospective customer, so professional Japanese calls for keigo, the polite register. Copy is written in the です／ます form, the reader is お客様, and the company refers to itself modestly as 弊社. Chatty, first-name marketing copy that works in English does not carry over as it is.

Conventions worth checking:

• Large numbers are grouped in tens of thousands: 1,200,000 customers is 120万, not “1.2 million”.
• Dates run year, month, day: 2025年4月1日.
• Addresses go from largest to smallest unit (country, prefecture, city, street), the reverse of Western order.
• People's names on a team page: family name first for Japanese staff, and job titles rendered the local way (代表取締役 for a managing director or CEO).
• Plurals don't exist: “3 offices” becomes 3拠点, using a counter suited to the thing counted.
• Punctuation is full-width: 、。（）, with 「」 as quotation marks.

Slogans built on puns or rhymes won't survive a literal rendering. Calliope conveys the intent, but give those lines a critical read.

What Manuce delivers, and what it doesn't

Your brochure goes to Calliope, the engine specialised in marketing and sales. Accepted formats are Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, plain text, Markdown, HTML, RTF and CSV. The file comes back in its original format, layout included: a PowerPoint deck stays a deck, with its slides and text boxes. For a typical brochure of around 1,200 words, the translation arrives within minutes and stays available in your client area.

Worth knowing:

• No conversion to vertical text. The original layout is kept, so the result is horizontal, left to right. A vertical (tategaki) edition is a separate typesetting job.
• No scanned PDFs. A scanned brochure without selectable text is not read. Outlined text or text baked into an image is not text either.
• No certified translation. A brochure rarely needs one; if an accompanying document does, use a sworn translator.
• No glossary. Manuce does not take terminology instructions. If a product line name should stay in Latin letters rather than katakana, check the free sample, then the full translation.

Japanese carries a surcharge: a ×1.6 factor applies to the per-word rate, already included in the quote you see.

Preparing the file and checking the result

Before uploading:

1. Start from the source file rather than a print-ready PDF: Word or PowerPoint keeps editable text boxes. If the brochure was built in a desktop publishing tool, export a text-based PDF or a Word file.
2. Make sure headlines are real text: try selecting them; if nothing highlights, they won't be translated.
3. Leave breathing room in panels and call-to-action buttons (お問い合わせ for “Contact us”).

After delivery:

• Open the file on a machine with Japanese fonts installed and look for empty boxes or awkward fallback fonts.
• Check headings broken at line ends, stray 。 at the start of a line, and anything that was italicised.
• Verify brand names, figures in 万, any prices you converted to yen yourself, and contact details in Japanese format.
• Have a Japanese speaker read the final version, particularly the tone of the slogans.

In practice

1. Export your brochure as Word, PowerPoint or a PDF with selectable text.
2. Upload it, choose Japanese and a service level: the quote appears straight away.
3. Read the free translated paragraph to judge the register and how brand names are handled.
4. Pay, then download the Japanese brochure in its original format within minutes.
5. Check fonts, line breaks and figures on a computer with Japanese fonts installed.