Former professional interpreter here… I’m typing up a reply, but I hit “submit” by mistake and can’t get rid of this post. >_<
Former professional interpreter speaking here… I don’t know about that, but in the professional community an interpreter is someone who works with speech, while a translator is someone who works with text.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but necessity almost always dictates some amount of interpretation. You just never notice, if your interpreter is halfway decent. In fact, you can almost always be certain that your interpreter is lying to you, and by “lying” I mean “phrasing what was just said in a way such that listeners will interpret it in the same way a native speaker of the source language would have”. More often than not, this is for the sake of clarity or brevity. Japanese and English are actually great examples; Japanese has an extremely complicated system of honorifics, including a sense of ingroup/outgroup that changes depending on who’s talking, and on what subject they’re discussing. It’s certainly possible to convey this in english, but doing so tends to make things unnecessarily confusing for the English speaker. Half of a good interpreter’s job is having a deep enough knowledge of both cultures to confidently find a way of accurately conveying structures from the source language that don’t exist in the target language. Furthermore, when interpreting an English statement into Japanese, it’s necessary to understand the situation and everyone’s positions well enough to accurately use honorifics that simply aren’t present in English.
As far as the original OP goes, I agree that your translator was the main problem. You’ve already mentioned that he was an employee fluent in both languages, as opposed to a professional interpreter, and others have highlighted a few classic mistakes: picking and choosing what to translate, speaking in the third person rather than literally translating things (on average, clients will almost forget you’re there after about two minutes of “I have a question…” rather than “He has a question…”), and the like. In my mind, the really bothersome mistake is the fact that he’s holding exclusive conversations with both parties; something they stressed over and over when I was trained was the necessity of keeping both parties in the loop. If you ever need to clarify something or otherwise converse with someone, you’re supposed to instantly translate the clarification into the second language, even if it’s just a quick “Such and such a concept doesn’t quite translate, so I just took a sec to explain it in English”.
Also, I may be wrong on this point, but it seems as if English was your interpreter’s second language, and the bad vocabulary choices were a function of his not having all of the technical vocabulary in English to accurately render very specific Japanese instructions.
Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t have much constructive advice to offer… Non-Disclosure Agreements are a fairly standard practice if you want to hire a professional, though it’s quite possible that your company’s circumstances wouldn’t allow it.
Groman, it sounds an awful lot like you’re combining linguistic and cultural knowledge here… the culture you’re raised in has an awfully big influence on the way you grow to consider things. The language(s) you’re raised with have a large effect on the way you formulate your ideas when you try to convey them to others.
Nope, the OP is completely wrong about this as a language problem. The examples given:
This is complete bullshit. I’ve lived in Japan for 20 years, my career is in sales and marketing and and fluent in the language. I sell to Japanese clients, in Japanese and you are full of it. It’s obvous that you haven’t the slightest clue about what you are taking about.
Get your Japanese translator to give the original for what you are claiming here.
This simply is your problem. The translator simply needs to translate each sentence one at a time. You should never allow a ten minute monologe go on without getting translation. The translator cannot remember anything more than about one or two sentences. Have them directly translate and even if not everything gets into perfect English, you’ll still be far better off than you are now.
I once worked where we had a similar situation, only it worked to my advantage.
We were working with a customer in Argentina, and had a programmer (let’s call him “J”) who was every bit as fluent in Spanish as he was in English. Since he was also a good programmer, we never had ANY technical difficulties of the sort described. For the most part, he could take care of all such discussions himself without input from other programmers, and when he did need my input, he knew exactly what detail it was that I needed to address, and when I gave an answer he could go straight back to the customer and tell them what they needed to know. It was great.
The only problem was, J was so good at this that the customer came to only trust his translations, and later in the project he continually got pulled into meetings on legal and contractual matters, which he really, really hated. Poor guy.
Ooh yea, I’d forgotten all about that bit… no idea where he got it from, but it isn’t accurate.
That isn’t strictly true… he’s already mentioned that his interpreter isn’t a professional, so I’m less likely to vouch for his memory, but a well-trained interpreter who knows the shorthand can probably remember about eight to ten minutes of speech with a page of notes, and about five to six minutes unaided.
The interesting thing about this is that it begins with a claim that certain concepts expressible in Japanese cannot be expressed at all in English, then it goes on to express them in short and fairly natural bits of English. Then, to top it all off, it claims that a “correct” translation in each case would not have been those bits of English which apparently accurately described the meaning of the original Japanese, but, rather, would have been an unnecessarily clipped and misleading bit of English which leaves out much of the original meaning.
I was talking about amateur interpreters. True, professional ones are better, and can remember longer, but when you have the Sales Manager translating, a lot of his mental RAM is getting tied up with his thoughts about the situation. He’s worried if the customer is unhappy, etc., and can’t concentrate on what is being said.
I’ve interpreted for countless meetings and have seen other amateurs interpret countless others. Unless you are a professional, it’s never going to be 100%, even if you have someone native level in both languages.
The premise that it’s a language issue in this case is absurd. Imagine that you are a Japanese with a little knowledge of English but are using an interpreter to talk to an American you’ve met before but haven’t seen for a while. You comment on how much weight she’s gained, which is perfectly normal for your culture, and your interpreter skips over that. Should you conclude that Americans don’t have the ability to formulate a sentence saying that someone is now fat?
As previously pointed out, the problems in the OP obviously can be traced heavily to the interpreter. There are strong cultural reasons for the difficulties as well. Japanese can be the most difficult customers and the pickiest about seemingly unimportant details that it can make most Western companies want to pack up and leave. The story in the OP is, unfortunately, not atypical, and specific strategies need to be developed on how things need to be handled. Without more of an understanding of the specifics it’s impossible to say what these strategies are for this case, but I’ve asked my customers if there are alternative in the marketplace which can do what they want. It usually makes them quite unhappy, so this is a tool which needs to be used with care.
It could very well be that the customer wanted to “prove” a point, which the Sales Manager needed to have picked up. Often it works to acknowledge that your products are “flawed,” which means that you “apologize” for this and then sell them what you have. The terms in quotes are used radically different in Japanese than in English.
It doesn’t sound like the Sales Manager and the OP are on the same page. I’d recommend having a pre-meeting to ask what concerns the customer will likely bring, what things should be said, what shouldn’t and to have a sentence by sentence translation. It’s up to the Sales Manager to pick up on the non-verbal clues as well as the indirect verbal ones.
More on this please. 
-FrL-
As a stereotype, you can count on Americans to not apology much, if ever. Insurance companies tell you not to apologize since that may be taken as an admission of guilt. Japanese treat apologizes as more of social niceties, in which you say you are sorry for the trouble the other person has had, even if they are at fault.
This point is shown in a obvious exaggerated manner in a presentation I give on teaching Japanese business culture to Western businessmen.
Japanese will tend to have an exaggerated sense of perfection in products. It can come out in the strangest places and in areas which Western businesses don’t think of. Sometimes you can be OK but there are types of business which I would just as soon not get into. For example, I would prefer to be staked down next to a hill of fire ants, with honey dripped into my eyes, rather than OEM to a large Japanese corporation. The pain would be less, with not nearly as much frustration.
The esoteric argument in the OP sounds all too familiar. There are a few ways around this. One is to make silly promises to “study the situation” and “do the best we can” if something new comes out, and another is way it to acknowledge that your product is “flawed” in terms that it doesn’t have super powers. We will, of course, be looking for ways to upgrade the product in order to handle machinery dropped off by alien life forms. The only hard parts are (1) avoiding making actual promises which will require actual performances and (2) keeping a straight face when saying this. I’d suggest a training regiment including trying to get through a chapter of a Dilbert book without laughing.
There are huge cultural gaps between these two countries, and navigating them is not trivial. It is, however, what I do for a living, so I know that it’s possible.
The only reason it happened was due to me getting caught between the customer and the whiteboard so to speak. The question was asked a day before, and was phrased as “How to specify geometry in feature X?” – a purely technical question. Nine times out of then a purely technical answer is satisfactory, and that’s what I had prepared.
As a follow up, this question got reopened. Since I now wasn’t caught off guard I deferred the question to marketing by claiming that for my company to provide me the information required to answer their question would allow other customers to be privy to their private technical specifications.
This is one of those instant deferrals I’ve learned. Basically “We don’t have a generic document describing <blank> because it would tell other customers that you were using <blank>. We can devote an engineer to custom write a document for you describing <blank> but we have finite resources and that engineer is not solving other problems for you.” in less words. An American version of this would be “Stop poking me, I don’t know.” 