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Methods For Translation From English To Japanese Words
When attempting to translate Japanese to English words or English to Japanese words, oftentimes the process can be nearly impossible. However, once the basic process is learned, translation can be comparatively easy with regards to certain types 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. The reason for this is the vast cultural and societal differences between Japan and the English-speaking countries. For example, students of the martial art 'Aikido' practice in a 'dojo'. Both of those words are uniquely Japanese, and thus have no translation from the Japanese language. An example in English could be that 'New England' is home to many 'Democrats'. You couldn’t translate that sentence into Japanese without keeping the English in it, as those words just don’t exist in the Japanese language. Japanese has a basic syllabary, or set of symbols 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. Written Japanese 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 translated into Japanese. Some examples: taxi is 'ta-ku-shii' and coffee is 'ko-hii'. 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 just 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. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com Drew Bartlett is the head writer for www.JapaneseLanguageNow.com, which provides Japanese language articles and resources, including how to translate English to Japanese words. |
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