English into Japanese was much harder than Japanese into English 🐧

People assume it's the other way round.

Japanese into English was, surprisingly, manageable. Clients didn't say much technical. They'd say "we run this kind of business, so please build it like this," and if I understood the content, I could translate it.

The one with real bite to it was English into Japanese.

Turning a technical sentence an engineer wrote into Japanese, I'd start from "can I even write it this way in Japanese?"