Japanese Language Translations

[Inmars4]

If ya can read this could post the kanji up for me.

[Lenience]

Great link:

http://www.japan-escort.net/tocall_en.html

[Kimura Takuya]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDNtzMUy4vs&NR=1

anatawa fua-kin sukidesuka~? lol

[Chocha Monger]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDNtzMUy4vs&NR=1

[Zcorps]

For you firefox users, theres also an extension called rikaichan. It works exactly the same way rikai works, the only difference is that you don't copy and paste anything, It works simply by right clicking anywhere on the page and clicking rikaichan on the menu.

http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

[Stew2]

Nope, I understand the instructions quite well; the Excite site simply does not work for me, while Babblefish does.
In any case, I speak Japanese, so I don´t need machine translation. However, I do use this site to help me with kanji. Quite helpful for those like me who speak Japanese but read Kanji only at maybe first grade level:

http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl

This allows you to mouse over kanji texts and see the reading plus kanji translation pop up. If you speak Japanese, this is much, much more useful than machine translation.

Indeed, the rikai site is also useful and I am glad to know of it. Thanks.

Can't explain, then, why you aren't excited by Excite... but as with everything else in this sport, YMMV! Enjoy.

[Nino]

Not sure why Excite wasn't working for you... here is a perhaps easier set of instructions to make it go. (snip)

Nope, I understand the instructions quite well; the Excite site simply does not work for me, while Babblefish does.
In any case, I speak Japanese, so I don´t need machine translation. However, I do use this site to help me with kanji. Quite helpful for those like me who speak Japanese but read Kanji only at maybe first grade level:

http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl

This allows you to mouse over kanji texts and see the reading plus kanji translation pop up. If you speak Japanese, this is much, much more useful than machine translation.

[Stew2]

Well, my reading ability in Japanese is minimal, so I would say you don't need too much to negotiate the Excite translator, so long as you follow my instructions below...

Excite and Babelfish are about the same in terms of quality of translation - I compared the same paragraph from Paprika about requesting a second shot in advance and both are quite poor English but comprehensible enough and clearly make the same point...

The main advantage of Excite is that it translates everything on the page it can at once, and as you proceed to subsequent pages from the main page, it continues to translate... so you only have to make the request once. In my book that beats continuously searching around the original page having to go back and forth to translate each different block of text blindly... That's why I offered information about it - I was quite happy to find it after struggling with the sites that ask you to cut and paste the blocks one at a time.

Not sure why Excite wasn't working for you... here is a perhaps easier set of instructions to make it go.

There are three things to do:

1. Input the URL of the site you want to translate in the big box beneath where it says "URL"

2. Select the lower button just beneath where you input the URL - it looks like this: 日ー＞英

3. then press the button enclosed in yellow.

It should open the original website again with all the translatable portions in English.

Maybe my earlier instructions weren't as clear? (I think they moved the "from" and "to" language button from one side to the other since I wrote the earlier description, so maybe that was the source of the problem...)

Actually, the Jim Breen site you mention really requires some Japanese knowledge to make sense of it. The "Excite" site strangely does not work form me.
The good old Babelfish site does work:
http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/

But of course, machine-translated Japanese does take some imagination...

[Nino]

There is nothing like asking an expert, but often we don;t have anyone we can pester. There are a number of programs that will take a webpage and return it in English for you., It is hit or miss whether it works for a given page, but I have occasionally found it helpful.

You can try this website: http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/

You put the URL from the site you want to translate to English in, and then make sure the Japanese to English button is selected (just below the place to put the URL it's the button to the right), and then hit return. It opens up a new window with a machine translation of the page you entered. The translations are far from perfect (any native speaker of English can see the problems right away even if you don't understand Japanese) but you can get a good distance this way if you can't read any Japanese. It works for some websites and not others, in my experience. But it's worth a try. I tried it for a website mentioned on the Kansai page (http://www.tokyosecret.tv/wiki/index.php?FrontPage) and it worked pretty well. I'll post this and related info in the translation forum as well for others.

I found about about these from Jim Breen's Japanese page (full of interesting links irrelevant to this forum: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html. Check out the links for translation to see more...

Stew2

Actually, the Jim Breen site you mention really requires some Japanese knowledge to make sense of it. The "Excite" site strangely does not work form me.
The good old Babelfish site does work:
http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/

But of course, machine-translated Japanese does take some imagination...

[Stew2]

There is nothing like asking an expert, but often we don;t have anyone we can pester. There are a number of programs that will take a webpage and return it in English for you., It is hit or miss whether it works for a given page, but I have occasionally found it helpful.

You can try this website: http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/

You put the URL from the site you want to translate to English in, and then make sure the Japanese to English button is selected (just below the place to put the URL it's the button to the right), and then hit return. It opens up a new window with a machine translation of the page you entered. The translations are far from perfect (any native speaker of English can see the problems right away even if you don't understand Japanese) but you can get a good distance this way if you can't read any Japanese. It works for some websites and not others, in my experience. But it's worth a try. I tried it for a website mentioned on the Kansai page (http://www.tokyosecret.tv/wiki/index.php?FrontPage) and it worked pretty well. I'll post this and related info in the translation forum as well for others.

I found about about these from Jim Breen's Japanese page (full of interesting links irrelevant to this forum: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html. Check out the links for translation to see more...

Stew2

[Sudsy]

Anyone know what a P映画館 is? I know eigakan, but the P is throwing me off a bit. It seems to be something sex-related, but I'm not sure.

P映画館=ピンク映画専門館 (pinku eiga senmon kan)

Adult movie theater.

[NicFrenchy]

Anyone know what a P映画館 is? I know eigakan, but the P is throwing me off a bit. It seems to be something sex-related, but I'm not sure.

I think it just means P Cinema, maybe a Chain of Cinemas?

[Azure Knight]

Anyone know what a Ｐ映画館 is? I know eigakan, but the P is throwing me off a bit. It seems to be something sex-related, but I'm not sure.

[Inakajin]

OMG, someone has discovered Babelfish. I shudder to think what some of think you are reading when you try to read Japanese that way...

The ad simply asks you to call them to register for 2P or 3P play. (In polite language, btw, I guess that confuses Babblefish even more :-) )
Do you want to work as a fuzoku girl?

Online translation services don't do too bad a job with languages not so dissimilar from English (for example, I used one in France to translate that language into English and could understand fairly well), but Japanese-English & English-Japanese translations are atrocious and often absolute babble. If you understand Japanese grammar, word order, use of honorific and humble language, etc., not to mention all the slang and euphemisms used in the sex industry--many of which are not even in unabridged Japanese-Japanese dictionaries--you can see why.

Every term, in every class of Japanese students I have, it seems at least one of them will do their writing assignments in Japanese then use online translation to change it to English. I can detect it within seconds, because no matter how primitive the students' own English writing might be, it's ALWAYS more comprehensible than the absolute shit the translations produce.

In order to convince my students of the uselessness of those services, I also tried it from English to Japanese once, using a paragraph from a book I published. Ran it through 5 different online services and got 5 significantly different translations, all of which looked bad to me. I then showed them to my Japanese wife and my Japanese students, and w/i seconds, they were all scratching their heads. My wife said she couldn't understand what any of them were about.

Thus, if you don't read Japanese but translate from sites into English, you most likely will 1) totally or substantially misunderstand it or 2) or not be able to determine any meaning at all.

[Suedehead]

The kanji here means to verbally "torment" (sexually), while the other means to verbally attack.

Thanks Inkajin, this kinda makes sense to me now in the context of the DH site that I saw it on.

One thing you can say about Japan: Basically anything can be had for a price!