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In English, you have some types of question formats such as:

  • Do you want to reserve a meeting room?
  • Is it correct that you want to ask about an employee?
  • Is it correct that you are sad?

With these types of formats, you can easily create questions such as:

  • Do you + {desire}
  • Is it correct that you {desire}

I have an application which need to automatically make those questions depends on the user's intents, but in Japanese. I want to know if there is any similar format such as those above. Assume if the user wants to reserve a meeting room, I can do something like 'Do you' + 'want to reserve a meeting room' in Japanese.

Thank you for your help.

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    Hi Huy, thanks for your first question on Japanese Language Stack Exchange. It would be great if you could edit your question to indicate your research effort (e.g. what formulations you think might work in Japanese). Otherwise this question risks being a translation question, and thus off-topic (see: japanese.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic).
    – henreetee
    Nov 8, 2019 at 10:36
  • @henreetee, thank you for replying. Unfortunately, i don't really know Japanese. I tried to use Google Translate and test some of the examples but it seems that different sentences hardly have any resemblance to each other. I'm sorry if this question is off-topic, feel free to close this if it's necessary.
    – Huy
    Nov 8, 2019 at 11:11
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    Ah, I see. I think then you may need to provide more information about the situation(s) that you are trying to describe in your app (and also possibly learn some Japanese!). The difficulty is that there's less of a 'one size fits all' approach compared to English, just because of the way politeness, respect, and formality are expressed in Japanese, not only implicitly through word choice, but also explicitly through grammar (in the case of politeness and respectfulness). So, the situations in which a given phrase might be acceptable could be very odd or unacceptable in another.
    – henreetee
    Nov 8, 2019 at 12:11
  • @henreetee Thank you for your answer. After asking around, i also feel like this approach is improbable, so i've decided to just manually create all Japanese sentences for each intent. I just figured that i should ask to see if there is a solution such as in English first, but it seems that Japanese is much more complex to conveniently create sentences like above.
    – Huy
    Nov 11, 2019 at 10:19

1 Answer 1

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A good resource for software localization is Microsoft’s Localization Style Guides, available for Japanese as well.

Specifically for confirmations, it seems to recommend the form 〜しますか?

E.g.

Do you want to save changes?

変更を保存しますか?

In some programs I’ve also seen a pattern 〜よろしいですか？, especially before potentially destructive operations like exiting without saving changes, so it has a subtext of “are you really sure you want to proceed?”

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