Hello, This is a general suggestion for the Google Translate development team. In college, I took a year of Japanese classes and I continue to study the language and culture on my own. It would be extremely useful to myself and other people working with the Japanese language if some new features were implemented.
1) Furigana - The Japanese written language consists of three libraries of characters, two phonetic and one character. Furigana is a fancy name for a pronunciation guide placed above Kanji characters as an indication of how to pronounce the word represented by the characters. If this was implemented into the mouseover functionality somehow, it would be incredibly useful for learning characters in sentences that you don't recognize. 2) Romaji - Japanese words spelled out using the English alphabet are called Romaji. This is important for beginners that don't understand Hiragana (the Japanese phonetic alphabet) or Katakana (the same phonetic sounds, but slightly differently drawn characters for foreign words) yet. It's also useful for people that aren't comfortable typing in the Japanese phonetic alphabet yet. http://nihongo.j-talk.com/kanji/ The website above is a good example of the kind of functionality I'd like to see implemented into Google translate. It has the ability to take a Japanese sentence with Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana or a mix of all three and convert them to be shown simply in Hiragana or even in Romaji. If Google translate implemented this kind of functionality, it would become the ultimate resource for people trying to learn Japanese. If there was also mouseover functionality added that would give you the meaning of specific kanji in a sentence, then it would be all the better. Please take these suggestions into consideration, thank you. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
