One of the concerns that many people raise is “Why are there so many complaints about the quality of products that have been localized into Japanese compared to other languages?” In fact, the complaints that come to the surface are only the tip of the iceberg. The number of potential complaints should be considered to be much greater. Japanese people are not very assertive and rarely make complaints, and they just change products without saying a word. This leaves the manufacturer with stagnating sales without any opportunity to find out the reason for the poor sales results. The manufacturer cannot wait for feedback from the user. In order to succeed in the Japanese marketplace, it is of the utmost importance that you gain a good understanding of the quality levels expected by your users before you create a manual. A well-known PC magazine conducts an annual survey of the levels of satisfaction with the manuals supplied by PC manufacturers. Because Japanese people are easily swayed by reviews and opinions from other people, the results of this kind of survey have a particularly strong influence on sales. Once a product has received a “poor quality” rating from a reviewer, it can be difficult for that product to recover. The strength of Human Science is our in-depth knowledge of the Japanese marketplace. Our know-how of the Japanese language has been cultivated by over 20 years of technical writing experience, and it is allowing us to develop localization services that are highly regarded by many clients. We have also provided Japanese businesses with services for creating multimedia content and developing software from scratch for many years. With all of this knowledge and experience applied to localization, we are able to resolve various problems and obstacles that may arise during the localization work in-house. It is thus not only the quality of translation that keeps our clients extremely satisfied, but also the quality of our support for other aspects of the localization process. The high level of confidence that our clients place in us is proven by the large numbers of returning customers and customers who find us by word of mouth. Manufacturers who are successful in Japan spend a large amount of time on planning and research before creating a manual in order to respond to the various user demands described above. We have a track record of over 20 years supporting the production of manufacturer manuals that meet such demands. We are particularly active in the following aspects of manual production. We also apply this wealth of experience to localization. Is your company not satisfied with simply replacing English with Japanese? Are your manuals really easy for users to read? Those products which need to be localized were not originally created for Japanese users. Even so, there are a variety of techniques that can be used to fit them into the Japanese marketplace. Japanese people have grown up in a cartoon culture, and prefer things to be explained using illustrations and screenshots than texts. A manual is considered to be superior if the user is able to follow the procedure intuitively with illustrations and screenshots rather than reading the text line by line. Users are discouraged from a thick manual crammed with information. Although Japanese people prefer printed manuals, it does not necessarily mean they like reading. Users who discover mistakes complain to the manufacturer with an air of triumph. Users will pick on errors on button names and even for duplicated punctuation. Regardless of the user's level, the manual needs to capture their interest so that they continue reading to the end. Some manuals employ methods such as using cartoon characters to introduce specific application examples, or presenting the text in the style of a magazine, in order to make the user want to read through the manual.

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