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2020-06-17 "Obey Google" [長年日記]

Sometimes I have to write a sentence in English, however I have trouble converting infrequently used Japanese into English.

"Koudou Henyou","Sontaku" "Nemawashi" I think it would be great if someone could translate these Japanese words into English in one shot.

In my case, this is how it translates (I'll use "Nemawashi" as an example)

(Step 1) First, look up several English words on a translation site.

For example, "digging round root", "behind‐the‐scenes negotiations","lay the groundwork".

(Step.2) Check the number of hits on Google search by phrase.

In this case, there were 82 cases, 253,000 cases, and 9,340,000 cases, resulting in "lay the The "groundwork" will be the winner.

This is the so-called "Google Ruling".

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However, in cases such as "Koudou henyou",

"behavior change", "behavior modification" came up.

("behavior therapy" also comes up, but even I can dismiss this one.)

In this case, the number of hits could be the same digit, 7,480,000, 4,480,000. I'm honestly baffled when these happens

In those cases, I have to read through all the papers and reports where the terms are used, and it's very cumbersome.

Well, "Google Ruling is not a panacea either".

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Anyway, I don't get upset when a native speaker tells me that my chosen term is odd to use that way.

I would argue to the contrary.

"Don't get cocky, you who are a native speaker of a language spoken by about 10% of the world's population"

"The oracle at the moment is Google"

"Obey Google"

I will call my bluff.