Home > Transcribing English to Japanese

1 Reasons for transcribing

The purpose of the transcription partly determines how it is done. There are reasons why one would want to transcribe an English word to Japanese: Many legal documents, such as company registration s, require that only Japanese script is used. A computer database may need entry in Japanese script for the purpose of sorting and collation. Educators want to explain the pronunciation of English words by transcribing. Loan words from English are usually written in a transcribed form. Or one may simply be interested in how one's name looks in Japanese.

Accordingly, there are different priorities for the transcriber. The educator might want to indicate many of the subtleties of English pronuciation whereas a person naming a new product might be more concerned with the ease of pronunciation for native speakers of Japanese.

2 The difficulties

Japanese distinguishes fewer sounds than English. For example, Japanese does not distinguish the vowel sound of "run" and "ran". Moreover the rules by which sounds can be combined in Japanese are generally more restrictive than the English rules. As a result, the pronunciation of the transcribed word can differ rather a lot from the original word in English.

3 Methods for transcription

Most Japanese people do not use a system for transcription; instead they transcribe according to their perception of the English pronunciation. However the process can be formalized, as below.

3.1 1. Write the word phonetically.

The first task is the write the word to be transcribed phonetically. The phonetic transcription should reflect the careful pronunciation of the word, and avoid slurring. So "Kate" becomes "keit" and "reform" becomes "ri:fo:m" (with ":" indicating a long vowel")

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3.2 3. Simplify the consonants

Some consonant sounds that do not exist in Japanese have to be changed.

• Change "l" to "r".
• Change "th" (in "thin") to "s".
• Change "th" (in "that") to "z"
• Change "si" to "shi"

Other changes can be made if the ease of pronunciation for native speakers of Japanese is a high priority.

• The "v" sound can be changed to "b".
• The "ti" and "di" sounds can be changed to "te" and "de"
• The "tu" sound can be changed to "tsu".

3.3 4. Split consonant groups and add vowels to terminal consonants.

3.4 5. Break into mora

3.5 6. Transliterate

4 Example

English: "My hovercraft is full of eels."

Step 1:

Step 2: "mai hov@kra:ft iz ful ov i:lz"

Step 3: "mai hovakra-ft iz fur ov i-rz"

Step 4: "mai hovakura-futo izu furu ovu i-ruzu"

Step 5 - Romaji: "ma.i.ho.va.ku.ra-.fu.to.i.zu.fu.ru.o.vu.i-.ru.zu"

Step 6 - Japanese: 「マイホヴァクラーフトイズフルオヴイールズ」