Japan is a country of non-English speaking and using two stykes of original
phonograms (kata-kana and hira-gana) and ideograms of china
origin (kanji), thus translation and/or transliteration in chemical
terms (as well as those of any other fields) is always a critical issue.
Japan has an over 140-years history of translation, in addition to the 2000-years
history of import of words and concepts with the Chinese ideograms from
China and Korea. Until recently, the Japanese thought it best to try to
translate everything, including names of substances because the Chinese
ideograms are very suitable to "create" translated terms.
"Japanese Scientific Terms" authorized by the Minsitry of Education: One characteristic feature of Japanese situation is that the Ministry of Education has been trying to authorize one Japanese term (mostly translation but sometimes transliteration is adopted) for one English term, by compiling "Japanese Scientific Terms" for each academic field. For chemical terms, there has been two major reviews and enlargements (1974 and 1986) after the first authorization in 1955. The 1986 version, compiled as a 700 page book, contains ca. 11000 terms (each with both English -> Japanese and Japanese -> English references). All the textbooks for primary and secondary education, and most of those for university and higher education, follows the authorization.
New technical terms, derived after the last authorization are (1) transliterated and/or (2) translations are suggested by the author(s). It sometimes occurs that there exists two or three translations for one English term. This confusing situation, which only matters in unversity and higher education, usually lasts until the next authorization is made.
Transliteration is made based on the English 'spelling', rather than its pronunciation.
For transliterated terms in Japanese, only one style of the phonograms (kata-kana) is used, while only hira-gana and kanji are used for other terms. Consequently, it is very easy for the Japanese to distinguish transliterated terms among Japanese sentences.
Some instances for the treatment of technical terms are presented in the supplimentary material.
Problems Posed: With the help of the "Japanese Scientific Terms", it makes little problem in teaching chemistry in our mother tongue, except in graduate and higher course. However, a serious problem occurs when we go abroad and talk in English. This is because (1) most of the technical terms are translated so that we have to memorize their English counterpart, and (2) the rest are transliterated based on their spelling rather than English pronunciation, so that the pronunciation by the Japanese often causes difficulty to be understood by the foreigners. This might have been a hurdle to overcome for the Japanese to be "international", for which no practically effective answer has been suggested.