Help - English to Japanese symbol translations?

[seventhson]

My son, 9, is a naturally talented artist and recently has become interested in anime and wanga and has been invited to hang some of his art in a very popular store which sells such items.

We have tried to find places online where he can translate some of his text to Japanese but either they charge money or the sites don't seem to work.

Do you need to download a character generator or something? (I do not even know the right terms to use to search)

Anyone know Japanese or know enough to help us so he can try hius hand at titling his material authentically?

Thanks

[Voice_of_Europe]

1. Try this!

Problem is:
Japanese consists of THREE entirely different sets of "letters".
In any text those 3 forms of writing are totally freely mixed, depending of the history of a word.

There are Kanji, which are the really weird picture symbols originating from China, where every word has an own complicated symbol.
Used for historic Japanese/Chinese word combinations

And Hiragana, this is a syllabic writing where you have a symbolfor every syllable. Example "Katana" (Sword) is written in 3 symbols Ka-Ta-Na. This is a very easy system to learn as it only consists of about 50 symbols and you can write anything in it.
Used for all day normal stuff like "i go to ..."

And Katakana.
This is analoge and very similar to Hiragana. Historically it is the "male" wirting form, where Hiragana was the female form.
The symbols look somewhat stronger. They are mostly used for "foreign" words.

And of course Japanese people also learn OUR writing, which they call Romanji (roman/latin writing).



Easiest to learn are Hiragana/Katakana and you usually start with Hiragana. Theoretically you can write ANYTHING in Hiragana and Japanese will be able to read it, but some words just have to be written in the other writing for it to be "right" else it will look to them "misspelled".

A good site to start is:
http://www.thejapanesepage.com

Learn Hiragana:
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/hiragana.htm

Kanji Dictionary
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/kanji/kanji/dictionary.htm

You will be required to install Japanese fonts for the page to work and display nice symbolds instead of #######ç%&%ç&**

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Don't rely on the Internet to translate ANYTHING

Babelfish and the like produce pure, unadulterated crap, especially in a totally unrelated language like Japanese.

You need a native speaker of Japanese to tell you what the equivalent of your son's titles would be so that they would make sense to a Japanese person. Otherwise, you will end up with the equivalent of the weird English that you see in the Japanese media, such as "For Beautiful Human Life" (slogan of Kanebo Cosmetics) or "Cedric the Driving" from an auto company or "Let's Sports Violent All the Day Long" from a maker of athletic ware.

Unless you have a Japanese friend who will be willing to translate the titles as a favor, you will have to pay a translator. Sorry, but translation is a skill and a way that people make their living. If there aren't too many pictures, you may be able to find someone to do it for $50 or so.

I won't do it, not even for $50, because my specialty is taking Japanese text and rephrasing it in English-language thought patterns. Unless it's something really simple, such as nouns like "monster" or "spaceship," I would worry about producing spacy-sounding stuff like those advertising slogans. If he has titled each picture with a paragraph or another lengthy description, you need a native speaker of Japanese.

[seventhson]

3. Thanks both of you for trying - my father lived in Japan

and so I had some exposure to it growing up - but the symbols are too difficult to grasp easily - the history helps

my son mostly just needs isolated words and symbols so he needs a dictionary translation - "crazy mad mom" is one he was looking for.

Or prepositions like "to" and "from"

or how to do his name (alphabet)

the thing (MY COMPUTER PROGRAM) won't download the symbols so if you have any other ideas let me know.

I appreciate it and my son does too.