You don't need to read Japanese to see this one

Your product names are being translated into words

For an integration platform, partner and product names are not decoration — they are the catalogue. And proper nouns are precisely what machine translation is worst at. A representative pattern from our composite's Japanese pages:

What happened here: the composite's (fictional) AI coding-assistant partner, "Tessavox Script", has been split in half by the MT engine — "Tessavox" transliterated into katakana, "Script" translated into 「台本」, which means a screenplay: the script an actor reads. So the page invites Japanese developers to connect their code reviews to Tessavox: The Stage Play. Three paragraphs later, the same product appears untranslated as "Tessavox Script" — two renderings of one product on one screen, neither of them consistently searchable.

Why this costs more than a laugh:

• It breaks search. A Japanese user evaluating the integration googles 「Tessavox 連携」 — the Latin-script name plus a Japanese keyword, which is how Japanese practitioners actually search for foreign tools. A page that says 「テッサヴォックス台本」 ranks for a query nobody will ever type.
• It breaks trust at the exact moment of intent. The reader on an integration page is your highest-intent visitor. A mangled proper noun tells them: no human who knows this product has read this page.
• It's inconsistently inconsistent. Elsewhere on the same composite site, some partner names get katakana-ised (「フォーマスイート」) while others stay in Latin script (FormaSuite's neighbours on the same list). Each variant is a separate small signal; together they read as unattended.

Why this works: Japanese B2B convention keeps foreign product names in their original Latin script — Slack is Slack, not スラック, on every serious Japanese SaaS page. The fix is structural, not stylistic: a locked glossary of every product, feature and partner name, enforced before any sentence-level polish. Translate around the noun; never through it.

The numbers your buyers need are broken

Japanese enterprise buying runs on a written internal-approval document — the 稟議書 (ringi-sho) — and that document runs on numbers. Your Japanese page is where your internal champion goes to copy those numbers. Here is what our composite gives them:

Four distinct number injuries in four lines, and — this is the point — you can see every one of them without reading Japanese:

• The thousands separator became a punctuation mark. "4,500" shipped as 「4 、 000」-style spacing: the comma was auto-converted to 「、」, the Japanese comma between clauses, with stray spaces. To a Japanese reader this looks like the number was typed by something that has never seen a number.
• "$2 million" was transliterated, not converted. 「$2百万ドル」 stacks a dollar sign and the word "dollars" around a unit construction (「2百万」) that Japanese doesn't naturally use — native copy counts large numbers in 万 and 億. And a revenue claim left in dollars quietly tells the reader this page wasn't priced for their market.
• The counter word collapsed. "7 things" became 「7こと」 — Japanese requires a counter (「7つ」), and its absence is roughly as jarring as "7 thing" in English.
• Even the list numbering broke. "1." auto-converted to 「1。」 — a full stop swapped for a Japanese sentence-ending period, in an ordinal.

The strategic cost: the one part of a foreign-language page an HQ executive can audit is the digits — and the digits are exactly what the Japanese approval process needs intact. If your champion cannot lift a single clean figure from your page into their ringi document, your page has opted out of the Japanese buying process.

Why this works: the rewrite converts rather than transliterates — yen first with the dollar figure retained in parentheses for credibility, 万/億 units, restored counters, and list formatting a Japanese reader can paste straight into an internal document. Numbers are the cheapest trust you will ever buy in this market. They are also the cheapest trust to destroy.

The half-translated site

Our composite's Japanese navigation, reconstructed:

The pattern: the legacy pages — pricing, templates, integrations — were translated in an earlier localisation push, but everything shipped since (typically the newest, most strategic content: the AI-agent line) rides in from the global CMS in English. The Japanese site is perpetually 80% Japanese.

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic: "every page is 80% Japanese" is not 80% as good as a Japanese site. It is 0% as trustworthy. Because the English isn't distributed randomly — it sits exactly on the newest features, Japanese readers draw the accurate conclusion that the things this vendor currently cares about are not available in my language. And they draw a second, more damaging inference about the future: this is what the support experience, the documentation, and the contract process will feel like after purchase. In a market where buying a SaaS product means defending it to a committee, a mixed-language page is not incomplete content; it is evidence against the purchase.

The fix is triage, not heroics:

• Finish the money pages to 100%. Homepage, pricing, security, the top product line, and whatever page your Japanese ad spend lands on. No English strings, including navigation, buttons, form labels and cookie banners — chrome is where "almost done" is most visible.
• Fence off the rest. Pages that can't be maintained in Japanese should link out to the English site explicitly (「英語版ドキュメントへ」) rather than ship half-mixed. Japanese buyers handle "this part is English" gracefully; what they don't forgive is not being able to predict which language the next paragraph will be in.
• Put the newest product line first in the queue, not last. The current pipeline localises in chronological order of page creation — meaning the flagship AI story is the least Japanese thing on the site. Invert it.

A smaller, fully-native Japanese site outsells a larger, half-native one. Every time.

Testimonials translated word-for-word turn eerie

English-language B2B social proof runs on casual hyperbole — it's how enthusiasm is performed in that culture. Run it through literal translation and something strange happens. A representative composite testimonial, English original first:

And the Japanese the MT pipeline ships:

A Japanese reader gets a sentence in which a software vendor is credited as a saver of lives, understatedly, by a customer who would otherwise have become toast — read literally, because the idiom doesn't exist in Japanese. The tone lands somewhere between baffling and faintly menacing. This is not a translation-quality problem a better engine fixes; it is a genre problem. The source text is written in a register Japanese B2B communication doesn't use.

Japanese social proof has its own highly developed genre: the 導入事例 (case study), and its currency is not enthusiasm but precision — the workflow before, the workflow after, the number in between, and the job title of the person saying it. Here is the same customer, rewritten as Japanese buyers expect to meet them: