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Conrad
24th March 2001, 14:16
Does anyone know of a good site for English to Japanese translation? Also character recognition software perhaps?

Julien
26th March 2001, 13:35
Hi Conrad,

try http://babelfish.altavista.com/

it's the only on-line transaltor I know that translates to japanese kanji & kana.

good luck in your search

bye

Karl Friday
27th March 2001, 16:05
Originally posted by Conrad
Does anyone know of a good site for English to Japanese translation? Also character recognition software perhaps?

Be VERY careful what you do with translation software. There are several programs for translating between Japanese and English around, but none are even close to reliable. They tend to produce jibberish or complete mistranslations more often than they come up with anything directly useful. A friend recently sent me a file of sentences produced by the state-of-the-art translation software the folks in the computer lab at his university (in Japan) are working on. It was a scream--remember the famous Chinese-English translation software a few years back that translated "out of sight, out of mind" into Mandarin and then back to English as "invisible idiot". . . ?

The main value of translation software at this point is for speeding up the translation process. It can be used to find meanings for words and to produce VERY rough drafts for correction and polishing by human translators. But unless you can read and write Japanese yourself, you take a major risk of either looking like an idiot or actually offending someone, if you try to use the results of a machine translation as they are.

robuzo
29th March 2001, 23:53
JIm Breen's Japanese page at

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html

has all sorts of interesting J-stuff. Click on "Translation" for a variety of links to machine translation sites, etc., but be forewarned: as Karl Friday points out, machine translation (particularly Japanese to English) is more or less useless except as a diversion. The links to online dictionaries are probably more useful.

Mr. Breen's ukiyoe collection is good, too.