Should I ever need to hire a translation firm, I know one I won't be considering. A strange pang of kindness holds me back from giving out the befuddled firm's name here, but the FAQ page of these "Japanese translators of the highest quality" contains this goofiness:

[T]here are no such things as words in Japanese.

Apparently, the firm's "experienced Japanese translators" have never come across a Japanese dictionary. For the curious, here's a dispatch from reality: Japanese has words. Distinct words of the same sort – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on – that you'll find in every other human language. And a Japanese dictionary catalogs those words, in exactly the same way as does an English dictionary or Latin dictionary or what have you.

Why in the world would this firm say such a wacky thing? The apparent point of confusion: It is a fact that, like Chinese, written Japanese text typically doesn't place spaces between words. That's certainly a difference from written English, and it does mean there's no quick way to count the number of words in a Japanese text (which was the context of the discussion containing the quote above). Yet how does one possibly take "there are no spaces placed between the written words" to mean "there are no such things as words"!?

Wait, there's more! These same linguistic geniuses inform us that "There are no possessive forms of nouns or pronouns in Japanese". This couldn't be more wrong; not only are there possessives in Japanese, they're ridiculously easy to work with! (Just add "-no" to any noun or pronoun. Done. None of English's confusing "John -> John's", "it -> its", "she -> her (or hers)", "he -> his", "I -> my (or mine)", etc.)

They go on to describe a lack of "a/an/the", and a lack of plurals, as additional creators of complexity, when in fact these again make Japanese simpler.

And, of course, there's that beloved chestnut about number of alphabets: "There is only one English alphabet. The Japanese use three, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji." Putting aside the quibble that the latter three are not alphabets, an accurate description acknowledges that English has two alphabets, not one: upper case and lower case. If you want to argue that those are just two versions of the same set, and thus one alphabet, that's fine – but the same then applies equally to hiragana and katakana.

The addition of Chinese characters, on the other hand, is a notable point of departure from the English writing system, and that alone adds considerable difficulty. No argument there. But with that very real difficulty to point to, why do the culturologists so love that "one alphabet vs three" exaggeration?

In any case, the reason behind this translation firm's embellishments isn't hard to see. Like people who want to sell a book on an "exotic" land, or gain the speaker's podium with insights into a "totally opposite" culture, or just command a cocktail party conversation with tales of learning an "incredibly complex" language, these translators have a motive to crank the exoticism up to 11. In their own words:

Given that Japanese is such a complex language, would you really want to trust your translation assignment to a company who does not use experienced translators?

No... but nor would I want to trust my assignment to a company which tries to sell the pitch "it's so complex, you need our special skills" by making things up!