Translating English to Japanese Words

It is easy to see that English and Japanese are two very different languages

. Different writing systems, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary can make learning Japanese a significant challenge.

When it comes to the direct translation of English to Japanese words or Japanese to English, oftentimes the process can be nearly impossible. Once the basic process is learned, though, translation can be relatively easy when it comes to certain categories of words.

In many cases, translation is not possible because there are many English words that just do not exist in Japanese, and vice-versa. This is primarily due to cultural and societal differences between Japan and the English-speaking countries. For example, the samurai' were a Japanese warrior class that lived by the code of bushido'. Both of those words have no equivalent in other languages, and thus have no translation from the Japanese language. An example in English could be that a midwesterner' could go out to lunch and have a coney dog'. You couldn't translate that sentence into Japanese without keeping the English in it because those words just don't exist in the Japanese language.

Japanese has a basic syllabary, or set of script that consists of about 50 sounds, each of which is a combination of a consonant and vowel. It is on these 50 or so syllables that the Japanese language is built.

Japanese has borrowed or adopted many words from other languages and these are written out and translated through a character set called Katakana. The written Japanese language has three character sets Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. It is this third set of Japanese language characters, the Katakana, that is used to write out the foreign words and (non-Japanese) proper names. There are 46 symbols that each represent a single syllable and with them a word can be sounded out into Japanese. Some examples: golf sounds like 'go-ru-fu' and jeep is 'jii-pu'. These are non-Japanese words that can be sounded out in Japanese and then written out in Katakana.

It takes some time to learn the vowel pronunciation and all of the sounds within the Japanese language, as it shares very little with English. Once the basic Japanese language sounds are mastered, then it does become possible in some cases to convert English to Japanese words by merely sounding them out. That process doesn't make you fluent in Japanese by any means, but it is a necessary step to rounding out your conversational ability.

Translating English to Japanese Words

By: Andrew Bartlett

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