I need help with the translations of the word Seido 精度

Question

I am planning to start a small business in the art industry in the UK. I was brainstorming ideas for business names some time ago and I started typing in translations of English words I found relevant to the business goals.

I found that accuracy and precision both translated (through google translate) to Seido 精度.

I experimented with many other words but I kept returning to Seido as it is a short word, with few syllables and has a good ring to it.

Recently I was researching for website domain names and I found Seido is taken in many domains across the world for schools of karate. From my understanding Seido is not a traditional form of Karate and instead was a school created in 1976 in the USA and has expanded to other schools internationally. I became concerned that my interpretation (via google translate) was incorrect and that people could be associating the use of Seido with karate. On one of the karate websites they have quoted "'Sei' means truth, honesty and sincerity. 'Do' means Way". I would like to know if this is a more accurate translation of Seido (than accuracy/precision) or if they have interpreted the structure of the word in their own way?

I want to pay homage and respect to the Japanese values of workmanship, detail and precision with my choice of business name.

But I want to be careful that I am not naively using a word that may have other meanings or may be more commonly known as a form of karate, and would be detrimental to my businesses identity.

Thank you for any advice you can give me.

Answer 1

To answer your main question directly: Yes, 精度 (seido) can be used to mean "accuracy" or "precision" in most contexts.

Nevertheless, in certain contexts, where "accuracy" and "precision" are distinguished (e.g. scientific), there may be better-defined words (e.g. 正確 (seikaku) for "accuracy", 精密 (seimitsu) for "precision"). See: Science writing - exact, precise, or accurate

As has been noted in the comments above, 正道 (seidou) which notably uses different characters, means "path of truth" or "path of righteousness" or similar, and is a term used in judo. So, as you have discovered, the varying (in this case, sloppy!) forms of romanisation of Japanese terms into English may lead you to have some overlap in the romanised form.

Of course, how the word is romanised is supposed to be roughly phonetic, so it is helpful to consider homophones more broadly. There is one common true homophone (i.e. sounds identical to 精度), which is 制度 - meaning "system" (e.g. education system); and probably one rarer one 西土, meaning something like "Western lands". There are also plenty of 'false' homophones (i.e. sound not like 精度 but do sound like 正道), such as 聖堂 (Confucianism), with varying rarity.

It shouldn't be a problem in and of itself for people to work out which characters you are referring to (especially if the characters appear in your branding, or you give an explanation surrounding the genesis of the name), but there may be unintended associations when transliterated to "seido" for all of the reasons given above. That all said, most people in the UK obviously don't know Japanese, and it may just look like a generically Asian word to most people!

Finally, for what is worth, given 精度 is a Chinese derived word, and is rendered the same in simplified Chinese, 精度 is also used sometimes in Mandarin (pronounced jīng dù) to mean "precision". However, from what I have seen (as a non-native speaker, whose Mandarin is definitely worse than their Japanese!), it is used in the sense of "this ruler is precise to 1mm" as opposed to "precision" as the degree of reproducibility (which would usually be 精确度, I think), so you may wish to think about the branding from a Chinese language perspective too.

Hope that helps!