1.16.2009

When Japanese ends up in Chinese

When I translated Japanese years ago and did a search online, I ended up on Japanese pages. But it seems like there are a lot more Chinese sites out there recently because now if I don't know a Japanese word and do a search online to find out the meaning, I keep ending up on Chinese pages that contain the same characters as the Japanese word.

For instance, I saw the word 高分子 (koubunshi) and wanted to find out how it was used in context (it means "macromolecule" and "polymer"), and hit so many Chinese pages, I had to choose the "Japanese" option to be able to find just those pages.

Maybe it's scientific and technical stuff that is more prevalent in Chinese, especially since they block so many sites and information over there, but it really shows that they've entered the digital age because they definitely have crowded out Japanese sources online.

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