I think this doesn't have to do with the writing system, but with how heavily a culture relies on context to convey meaning. In general, East Asian cultures do it way more than the ones from Western Europe and the Americas, so Japanese/Mandarin/Korean/etc. speakers are way more likely to omit contextually clear words than German/English/French/etc. speakers. And if the translator is inexperienced they might try to translate the sentences word-by-word, or even get the context wrong, and in both cases you'll get issues.

EDIT: crafted a cute example based on… well, weeb knowledge. Consider the following situations.

1. Your friend stumbled and fell down, and you're worried they might have hurt themself.
2. You stumbled and fell down. You didn't hurt yourself, but a friend is worried you did.

Your typical English speaker would answer #1 with "are you alright?" and #2 with "I'm alright." Or similar. They might perhaps clip the verb from #1, or replace "alright" with "okay" from either, but the subject will be always there.

And yet that's exactly what Japanese does with "大丈夫" daijōbu. Sure, you could phrase it as a question in #1, like "大丈夫ですか。" daijōbu desu ka?, but for most part you don't need to; and you're certainly not including the pronoun, it's kind of obvious that the word refers to whoever fell down.

Now. Imagine you're translating that "大丈夫" into English. A noob translator might translate it with "alright"… and it gets hella confusing — what is supposed to be alright? Or they might pick the context wrong, and translate it as "I'm alright" when it's supposed to be "are you alright?" or vice versa.

Except Japanese won't do this just with the pronoun, or the "hey, this is a question!" mark. It'll do it pretty much all the time — why two words, one enough?

First, English is a Germanic language, so that's not a great comparison - modern German and English both stem from an earlier Germanic language, so they share a lot of words and basic structure (and just as important, the cultures where these languages matured shared a common history).

Second, what you're really comparing are languages with different origins, keeping in mind the written form of any language is at best a descriptive approximation of the spoken form.

So these are languages with very different sound structures, on top of cultures with different paradigms, histories, etc.

It's really a "Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra" problem - we really do a lot of communication via memes, as much as we may not notice it on the daily.

Back to translating logographic form of a language to another language that's written using an alphabetic form - the first is based on something like syllables or entire concepts, the second constructs those ideas/concepts via multiple phonemes->words>sentences. And now we circle back to the paradigms and memes of two different cultures.

Written langauge isn't just a different way to scribe the same things, it's actually scribing very different things depending on the underlying culture.

(I'm not a linguist - corrections from someone more knowledgeable requested).

Start with the difference between logographic language and alphabetic language. These are both written forms of spoken languages.

So part of the question will be: "is there a difference between spoken languages that first developed a logographic representation and spoken languages that first developed an alphabetic representation?"

In logographic languages, you're not generally representing sounds, you're representing concepts. In alphabetic languages, you're generally not representing concepts, you're representing sounds. If you invent a fundamentally new logograph, no one will know what it represents nor how to pronounce it until you tell them. If you develop a new letter, no one will know how to pronounce it until you tell them.

In an alphabetic language, you can combine letters to produce new words that may or may not have any relationship at all to similar words. The components in alphabetic languages essentially only carry a sound and no other meaning.

In a logographic language, you can combine logographs to produce new representations of concepts that generally have to relate to the concepts attached to the component logographs. Sometimes people can work out the new pronunciation as well.

Fundamentally, the ways in which we encode information in logographic versus alphabetic languages is wildly different. And since there are more concepts than could ever possibly be fully written down, these technologies need ways to expand. In alphabetic languages, we make new combinations of letter to make new words, but we also use idioms, phrases, and metaphors. Rarely do we make homophones and homonymns, but it happens. In logographic languages, nearly every logograph stands for multiple concepts by default.

At this point, it should start to become clear that if I am translating a text as text, without the context of the entire conversation, without hearing the spoken language, and without understanding the intent, subtext, poetic devices, and history of it all, then it's very very easy to get totally lost when trying to translate.

[deleted], see OP's profile for reasoning.