Japan’s early adoption of Chinese texts for the education of the elite produced a special way of marking Chinese texts in accordance with Japanese syntax so that Japanese people who did not know Chinese could nevertheless read such texts. Whether this method of notation and reading called Kambun kundoku can be clasiffiied as a form of translation is a subject still under debate. Whether it had an influence on Japanese translation norms is perhaps even more worthy of investigation. This paper explains in detail the method of Kambun kundoku, investigates its status and traces its conflict with the budding paradigmatic shift towards what we tend to think of as ‘normal’ translation.