ONLINE JAPANESE TRANSLATION

Online Japanese translation or Machine Japanese translation is the use of software or electronic device to conduct the translation instead of a human.

Advantages of Online Japanese Translation

• Speed - for large amount of text needing to be translated a software based system will be faster than a human conducting Japanese translation.
• Cost - software systems are relatively cheap and there are some free ones available on the internet.

Disadvantages of Online Japanese Translation

Cultural understanding - even within the English language there many cases where cultural misunderstandings occur. Words have different meanings in different countries; a "thong" in the USA normally refers to underwear, but in Australia it is something you wear on your feet that would be referred to as a "flip-flop" in the USA.

These sorts of problems are not limited to just machine translation, but many people conducting Japanese translation or indeed any form of translation can suffer from the same problems.

ONLINE JAPANESE TRANSLATION SITES

When you need important documents translated we strongly recommend that you use a quality Japanese Translation service.

Alta Vista Babel Fish Translation
Does many languages including Japanese to English and English to Japanese. It can do a few paragraphs or a whole web page. Seems to have a limited dictionary as it often shows Japanese where it cannot work out the translation. You may be able to understand the basics of what a text is saying. Rating 2/10.

Excite Japan
The interface is in Japanese, but if you can work through that then you will find an online translator with a significantly larger dictionary and a bit better sentence structure. Rating 3/10.

Google Translate Beta
The Japanese to English section of this tool is still in beta, but clearly it has a long way to go. The dictionary is similar in size to Babel. The sentence structure is probably worse than Babel. Rating 1/10