Thinking back to my recent Japanese translation of a browser extension, it reminded me of something. People often talk about "translating into native English," but I honestly wonder if that is the right way to look at it.
You can understand this better if you compare it to Japanese. In Japan, people often think of "native" or "Standard Japanese" as the language spoken in Tokyo or the Kanto region. But I feel that’s not quite right. In my personal view, Standard Japanese is simply a representative baseline for all the dialects like Akita-ben, Osaka-ben, Hakata-ben, and Kyoto-ben. Because it is difficult to codify every local dialect into writing, we simply needed a "standard" to serve as a reference.
Before I became ill with an incurable disease, I traveled all over Japan. I felt a deep charm in the local dialects. I learned that even a slight shift in intonation can completely change the emotion of a sentence—that is the beauty of dialects.
English is no different. Even if we take en-GB as a base, look at the diversity of language codes: en-US (USA), en-CA (Canada), en-AU (Australia), en-IN (India), en-SG (Singapore), en-PH (Philippines), and so many more.
With the rise of AI translation, there are now countless "accents" of English. In such a world, is it really necessary to obsess over being "native"? I wonder if I'm the only one who feels this way. Ultimately, what matters most is delivering the message you want to share as appropriately and beautifully as possible.
