Translators during the Meiji period not only coined neologisms but also often deliberately replicated the grammar and style of the source texts. For example, pronouns — which were unnecessary and rarely used in Japanese, where these forms had a somewhat different function – were inserted into translated texts to conform to the source text usage, and long English noun clauses were literally and unnaturally translated into Japanese. Writers such as Natsume Soseki

(1867–1916), who was himself also a translator, developed and promoted this new 'translationese' style. Despite their unnaturalness, neologisms and translationese gained acceptance among Japanese writers and audiences, who were searching for an innovative style of written Japanese that would reflect the new times and could replace the heavily Chinese-influenced style of the past, which was far removed from the everyday spoken language.

The following are two contrasting views on translationese by leading Japanese novelists representing the Taishō (1912–1925) and the Shōwa periods (1926–1987). Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–1965) criticized translationese in the early Showa period as a "monstrous style", saying:

I often see essays on economics by scholars in popular journals such as Chūō Kōron and Kaizō, but I wonder how many readers truly understand them. These essays are written with the expectation that readers have a good knowledge of the original language. Such essays look Japanese, but actually they are monsters of the foreign language. It is even harder to comprehend them than the original texts. I wouldcall them the worst example of Japanese sentences. (Bunshō Tokuhon 1934: 74, my translation)

Writing twenty-five years later, however, Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) recognized the popularity of translationese:

We now write Japanese compositions with translation-like expressions. Before the war, translationese was criticized, but not any more. Translationese is now the mainstream writing style, and authentic Japanese style is rare nowadays. Once translated concepts were limited to sophisticated philosophical thought, but they have been popularized and our everyday life is now influenced by imported concepts. (Bunshō Tokuhon 1959, 1973: 30–31, my translation)

After 1885 translations became more literal than in the early years of the Meiji period (Kondo and Wakabayashi 1998: 489), and Tanizaki was critical of the excessively source-oriented translations of his time. But after World War II Mishima acknowledged the prevalence of translationese, stating that it had become a part of the Japanese language.

Another way of importing foreign words into Japanese is transliteration, or the replacement of the foreign sounds with the nearest Japanese phonetic equivalent using the katakana syllabary. This practice started with borrowing from Portuguese in the 16th century and from Dutch during the 17th and 18th centuries. Beginning in the Meiji period, and especially after World War II, however, the proportion of loan words from English increased rapidly, and English is now estimated to represent 80–90% of all loan words in Japanese (imidas 1993). Of all 65,000 listings in a popular standard Japanese dictionary (Sanseidō kokugo jiten 1989), there are 7,100 (almost 11%) loan words. Transliteration does not require any effort to be made to convey the meaning of the original, but simply replaces the foreign sounds with Japanese sounds.

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