From: Josef 'Jupp' Schugt <jupp@...>
Date: 2003-10-10T01:21:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Internationalization (Re: embedded docs)

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 04:38:45 +0000 (UTC),
   Ethan Blanton <eblanton+news@cs.purdue.edu> wrote:

> You would be far better off to look for a native character set to
> English converter ... much of the meaning of a Japanese sentence is
> lost or becomes somewhat ambiguous when the kanji are removed.

I only did suggest the program because it takes lot of training to
read Kanji so it can be helpful to read the text in a simpler writing
and only take a look at the original text if the meaning is unclear.

> As far as automated Japanese-to-English conversion, I've not seen a
> free tool that does a good job. I'd be thrilled if someone would
> correct me here.  ;-)

Translations are even a problem in one of the easiest cases:
German -> Dutch. From a linguistic point of view Dutch and German are
one language (from a practical point of view they are two).
Nevertheless it is not very easy to translate Dutch to German or
German to Dutch. If this is already a problem, there is little chance
that a good *free* automatic translation software from Japanese to
English is feasible without spending lots of time and money.

I recently saw "Hotaru no Haka" in Japanese with German subtitles.
One time 'kamikaze' was left as 'Kamikaze' whereas in another
situation it was translated as 'der goettliche Wind' (the devine
wind). If one would exchange these two translations they would be
inappropriate because in the first case there were kamikaze up in the
sky whereas in the second case a man did say "Now not even a devine
wind will help us any more".

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt