The GITS Blog

It's surprisingly hard to pin down the meaning of 防止 (boushi). The Daijirin plays the old trick of converting the word into 訓読み and calling it a definition: ふせぎとめること。

As Daijirin so helpfully confirms, 防止 is a combination of the characters for "check/stem" and "stop." 防止 is often translated as "prevent," and that usually works, except when it doesn't.

Take for example the term 未然防止 (mizen boushi) — "prevent in advance?" Don't laugh. The Kenkyusha Online Dictionary (KOD) gives the brain-dead abomination "advance prevention" as a translation for this. As opposed to prevention after the fact, I guess.

Unthoughtful and/or incompetent translators seem happy to go along with Kenkyusha: here's a good example from Toyota's Sustainability Report 2008 (PDF):

As well as initiatives for the advance prevention of drainage system defects, vigorous action was taken to ensure the deployment of advance prevention measures based on near-miss situations at the Honsha Plant and other facilities. (emphasis added)

Unskilled translators (or overzealous editors with only rudimentary English skills) aside, the existence of the term 未然防止 is a strong hint that 防止 by itself doesn't quite mean "to prevent."

That gets us into trouble when we hit terms like 災害防止 (disaster "prevention") and 地球温暖化防止 ("prevention" of global warming).

Let's start with 災害防止. When a layperson thinks of preventing a disaster, we probably think about keeping it from happening, and would be puzzled by talk of "preventing" earthquakes or hurricanes. In this case, however, "disaster prevention" seems to be a term of art, meaning both prevention and mitigation.

Verdict: 災害防止 = "disaster prevention"

地球温暖化防止 is a bit thornier, however. Most Japanese clients like to translate this as "global warming prevention." But accepting the fact that global warming is already underway, the horse is already out of the barn: it's too late to prevent global warming.

When you look at authentic English sources, you usually see terms like combating/fighting/reversing/mitigating global warming; so in this case, I'd argue that the "check/stem" meaning of 防止 should apply. In fact, talking about "preventing" global warming could even be politically sensitive, since it might imply that you don't think global warming has started…

Even if the "check/stem" meaning is correct in this case, it's surprisingly hard to convince Japanese clients to go with a translation like "combating global warming" for 地球温暖化防止. It might be partly a desire to avoid "contentious" words like "combat" or "fight," but I think it's more due to a tendency for knee-jerk translation, and lack of comfort with any translation not found in the dictionary.

I'll keep combating the brain-dead translation of 防止, but I doubt I'll prevent many Japanese clients from putting out disastrous translations.