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Writing a letter in Japanese 2005/11/29 15:55
I am familiar with hiragana but I have difficulty saying what I want to say in Japanese. Does anyone know of a website that will translate a sentence in English to Japanese without using any kanji?
by Niece in Hawaii  

translators on the net 2005/11/29 17:41
I do not recommend any website that offer "translation" from/to Japanese language.
The reason is that all of them tend tend to conjure up some garbage from the original text that even native speakers cannot guess let what is written let alone understand at all.

If you want to be on the safe side and do not want to puzzle your friend or whoever you're writing to, I might suggest to find some useful sentences and phrases from books or online Japanese lessons and use what looks most appropriate for what you want to say.
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letter 2005/11/29 17:42
I find web sites like babel fish that do straight translations to be ok. Tbhey can get th eidea across somewhat but it can come out sound ign quite garbled and strange. So jsut be aware of that. Also letters in Japanese use a few differnt expressions then you would find in ordinary conversations, and aweb site translation wont cover those. Instead of going for an entire letter at first do most of it in english with a few lines in Japanese.
by name rate this post as useful

.. 2005/11/30 01:31
You'll need a real person to do it.

Online translation webistes, ie google or bablefish ALWAYS get the grammar incorrect and spits out garbage a lot of times too.
by ... rate this post as useful

writing a letter in Japanese 2005/12/6 04:28
Thank you very much for your help.
by niece in hawaii rate this post as useful

if you want to try a translator ... 2008/1/14 01:41
if you want to try a translator go ahead, it will be garbage but if it's kanji that bother you in particular you could copy and paste the entry into either Jim Breen's Japanese dictionary (just google it) or rikai.com-- Jim Breen's is a great resource to use, it doesn't do english to japanese of course but it provides a good dictionary.
by charles rate this post as useful

Don't trust Google Translate! 2008/7/16 02:50
I wouldn't recommend the use of Google Translate or Babelfish because the wording is terrible. I recommend the use of an actual translator. In fact, I'm planning on becoming a Japanese language translator after graduating from university and spending time in Japan for a certain period of time, where I will be continuing my language studies/training at a university there.
by Melissa rate this post as useful

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