If you’ve searched the web for geta or other Japanese topics, you’ve probably found that all the good pages are in Japanese. With a language like French or Spanish, you can at least spot a few words you recognize. This doesn’t work in Japanese because of their complex, multiple, writing systems. For that matter, you may not even see the right characters because you don’t have a Japanese font on your computer.
Fortunately, there are many automated web page translation services on the web. None of them work very well, but usually you can get the gist of the page.
If it doesn’t make sense, try another translator. For instance, the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of geta is “karan-koron.” Many translators turn this into “Faucet Colon.”
Here are the three I use the most:
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ Yahoo’s Babelfish is one of the oldest, originally part of the AltaVista search service. Douglas Adams fans will smile at the name, but anyone can use it.
http://translate.google.com/ Google Translate’s best feature is its accessibility. Frequently, Google search results will have a “[Translate this page]” link next to the result title. Google’s translator also has a few languages you won’t find elsewhere, such as Pig Latin and Klingon.
Google also has added a translated search feature to their site. There’s now a “Translated Search” tab on their translate page which lets you enter your search term in English and translates it and the results list and linked pages. Try it!
http://tool.nifty.com/globalgate/ Nifty is a Japanese site which is similar to Yahoo. While most of the online translators only rate one star in their Japanese ability, I’ll give Nifty’s two stars — it’s got a long way to go, but so far it’s the best. The interface is in Japanese, so you may have to operate by touch.
The upper section translates text, and the lower section (headed WWW) is for web pages.
To use it:
- Enter the text or web address in the appropriate section.
- Choose Japanese to English (circled in orange in the screen-shot).
- Click the button in that section.