im new to the translating thing. i got the turning the hiragana/kanji/katakana to romanji but from there im stumped.... i honestly don't know how i am supose to translate romanji to english. i got a few books and learned about hiragana/kanji/katakana and how to translate those to romanji...but not learning about how to change romanji is annoying me so much. if someone could give me some tips i would very much appricate it

wait...you're not a native speaker? or do u just know Japanese language well because you studied it?

i studied it. i am not a native japanese speaker. i am native to english. ive been learning japanese for a few years now because my friend has been teaching me, but he isn't able to teach me anything about the romanji.

There are many tools on the internet that you can use, to help you with translation... but what I started to learn how to translate J>E (and it is the not best way to learn J>E) is by watching anime, and to watch crunchyrolls subs (since crunchyroll is professional TLers).

You can also go to www.jisho.org, it is more of a vocabulary dictionary than anything... but you can look the hira/kata to learn it's meaning.

There are also Youtube videos, that actually shows you step by step on how to be able to interpret J>E...

But to learn Japanese, the internet is the best place for it... since there are a large number of providers that gives self teaching tools for people to learn Japanese

Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't understand... If you speak Japanese and speak English, then what's the problem? Why would you need to change words to romaji first?

Quote from Hanae

Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't understand... If you speak Japanese and speak English, then what's the problem? Why would you need to change words to romaji first?

exactly. what does romaji to do with translating? that only helps when you learn kana.

if there is an option between "to do" and "not to do", I will always choose the latter.

"what kind of crazy, twisted conclusion is that...?" - banana bread no puding

Hiya! Looks like you're a bit confused here so just a few tips.

First off - romaji (not romanji) is basically the transliteration of Japanese characters. For example, 学生 is the kanji, and the romaji for that is "gakusei". It's writing out how to read the characters using Roman letters. People who can't read kana (hiragana/katankana) use romaji instead.

In case you still don't understand, here's another example:

Japanese: 私の名前はボブです
Romaji: Watashi no namae wa Bob desu
English: My name is Bob

By the way, I don't recommend asking for help on Japanese in Baka-Updates. This place is mostly for discussing manga/recruiting staff. If you're looking for more info on the scanlating business (including translating), go to mangahelpers.com

Hope this helps!

I agree...

There's no need to translate kanji/hiragan/katakana to romaji. What you should translate it to is English or whatever language you are a translator for. Romaji is stupid to learn, it only hinders you later on. The best thing is just to learn the Japanese alphabet as it is and not take a reroute to learning it which romaji is.

People who learn Japanese who knows hiragana/katakana but not kanji fully and want to translate, use shounen and shoujo manga as translation material. The reason is that those manga got furigana that explains how to read the kanji. Furigana is basically hiragana so it makes it easier for them to look up the words since they got the "spelling" of the kanji.

I think the person who told you to write it to romaji didn't know what they were talking about but just guessed how it is done in scanlation groups... 😛