This past week I attended a meeting held by the Big Four accounting firm, KPMG, about their Japanese practice. The hour and a half presentation described what functions the firm fulfills, the positions available for their Japanese practice, and the requirements for each of the positions. Further, as many of the attendees were prospective interns and employees who live in Japan currently, they also described the processes KPMG has to help facilitate getting a visa to work in the U.S.
They described that a business-level knowledge of the Japanese language and the English language would be prerequisites to working with the Japanese practice teams in the American offices. They talked about the industry clients that each office serves, with examples being finance in New York City, automotive in Detroit, and technology services in their San Francisco office. Overall, I was shocked with how much katakana-English was used in relation to various business terms they used. Many times, they said the katakana-English word and then said the Japanese equivalent, which helped me pick up a few new terms.
During the presentation, I wrote down a number of new words that I heard as I can assume that I will need to know these vocabulary words if I intend to work with accounting in Japanese. Here are a few:
新しいたんご：
金融（きんゆう）ー finance
理解（りかい）ー understanding, comprehension
先ほど（さきほど）ー some time ago, a moment ago
可能（かのう）ー possible, feasible
国際（こくさい）ーinternational
I am amazed you were able to go through the whole meeting in Japanese, that's really cool. What was it like having being in the meeting, and having to stay with the flow while translating?
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