A number of blunders were recently found in the government’s Japanese translation of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) documents.
Shinzo Abe’s administration and ruling parties wish to search for an early solution to the problem by submitting a list of mistranslations for the TPP documents to the Diet so that the deliberation can be resumed to gain the Diet approval for the TPP free trade pact as early as possible.
Meanwhile, opposite parties urge that deliberations at the latest ordinary session of the Diet on the basis of the mistranslated text of TPP agreement should be regarded invalid.
They demand that the TPP free trade pact and related bills should be submitted again with corrected documents for the Diet deliberation from square one. In addition to the controversial transactions of rice imported under the government-controlled SBS system, mistranslated TPP documents have sparked an opposition backlash.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, three parts of provisions of the TPP agreement were mistranslated into Japanese.
For instance, translation on detailed part of an article of the TPP accord, providing that the domestic laws of the United States giving priority to sailing of US-flagged vessels shall be permitted an exceptional treatment under the TPP agreement, has been missing.
Parts of the translation for rules of origin of grains and other products are overlapped in the Japanese text of the agreement. In the briefing document of the TPP agreement, furthermore, there were 15 errors including mistranslation of English words and miswriting of numbers.