Does Culture Translate? A Case Study on Artificial Intelligence-Generated Text Concerning Japanese-Style Employment

Translation matters to international business when it has a discernible impact on firm performance or critical business processes. Current developments include machine translation, which is evolving in tandem with generative artificial intelligence (AI). On one hand, useful translation apps have become available to help the public communicate internationally. On the other hand, recent research concludes that even machine translation's best output still requires post-editing by a human. This argument implies that a machine-translated, grammatically accurate text may not always make sense to a human audience, possibly because of a semantic-pragmatic issue beyond the lexical level. This paper regards it as the issue of translation oddity, which has direct relevance to cross-cultural management. To unpack the issue, this paper examines English translations of AI-generated Japanese texts through an exploratory case-study analysis. The source texts are generated by the Japanese version of Google AI (as opposed to the English/original version) and machine-translated by Google Translate. This paper focuses on the interpretation of translated text, not on the linguistic process of translation. The case findings suggest, based on the AI-generated texts, that the Japanese version of Google AI is relatively collectivistic in comparison to Google AI evolving with English websites. This case-specific finding implies a theoretical proposition that machine learning promotes generative AI to "embody" intangible culture, defined as a system of thought. Akin to humans, AI systems can or will be individualistic or collectivistic, depending on the source-website language. This theoretical proposition points towards the future research area of cross-cultural analysis between generative AI systems. Additionally, future studies can conceptualize the issue of translation oddity, which concerns semantic-pragmatic incongruity beyond the lexical level, for the benefit of international business.