Apr 10

Translator’s Corner: Dictionaries!

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Anyone who works with language enough will start to develop serious relationships with their dictionaries. A few years back in my now defunct blog bout living in Japan, I wrote about my idiosyncratic relationship with three great print reference guides. For the most part I’ve stopped using them, and like pretty much everyone else am relying on the wealth of free language resources available online. What they lack in the personality, color and accumulated dirt of my paper dictionaries they make up by being flexible, constantly up-to-date, and practically limitless.

Still though, they all have their own quirks and strong points. Even aside from their Translate tool, (I still prefer Babelfish) Google is gradually becoming the standard way to check evolving word usages and meanings, but it doesn’t have the strong points of a dictionary: a comprehensive organization system, and specific meanings. Typing in “define:” and then a word, abbreviation or phrase will produce a page with definitions (i.e. “define:japanese“) but as far as I can tell this is currently only available in English. There are currently a wide, (and growing!) array of online Japanese-English dictionaries out there, almost all of them available for free. I’ll list a few here with their relative merits, but please add any others you know about in the comments!

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ALC (www.alc.co.jp)

Straight from the web-nerd humor of their byline “ALC, Creating an Earthling Network” (地球人のネットワークを創るアルク), ALC announces itself as a dictionary for the internet. ALC is not simply in the business of dictionaries and translation, it has a bewildering array of sites, all vaguely based around international subjects, but I’ll just be talking about the Japanese-English dictionary.

ALC may be the single dictionary that I use the most now, due to its strong search engine and large number of examples for each search term. Taking full advantage of the web, a search in ALC doesn’t try to categorize definitions, instead just bringing up any listing within ALC that contains that the phrase you want. Plugging natsukashii (one of my favorite Japanese words) into ALC produces 57 entries, from the first standard definition of “bring back memories”, to its use in phrases “down memory lane”.

Also scattered around ALC’s database are translations of essays and passages from fiction, and the natsukashii search produces two of these, one on the very natsukashii subject of  a disco revival in Japan. By expanding searches to include these tools, ALC allows you to get a larger feeling for each word or phrase, to pick it up and view it from a few dozen different angles.

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Rikai.com

Given that Rikai.com was built and designed by just one guy as a supplement to his Japanese studies, it’s amazing what a simple and powerful tool it is.
According to the “About” page on the site, Rikai.com was designed just by software engineer Todd Rudick as a way for him to help learn the readings of kanji. The system is simple, just paste some Japanese or English text into a box on the top page and hit “Go!”. You can then simply wave your mouse over the text and it will give you the readings and definitions of that word.

This is extremely useful if you’re trying to get through a large document, and you don’t want to cut-and-paste each word into a search engine. It sidesteps the main stumbling block of most online translators, grammar, and gives you the definition for any particular character or word you’re having trouble with.

The one drawback of Rikai.com is maybe inevitable given its small scale: it has a hard time recognizing obscure characters or words written completely in kana. Without spaces to define the beginning and endings of words, Rikai will either ignore hiragana or group it in strange ways.

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Online methods for researching or looking up kanji have been slower to move online than other dictionaries, but recently I stumbled upon this excellent resource from the Yamasa Institute’s Online Center for Japanese Studies.

The main page lists a variety of search options but I find that the “Kanji complex search” is the easiest way to get to the character you need. Search by readings, meaning in English, stroke count, or just check off boxes for the radicals in the character you’re looking for. Search results will not only show the character and its associated readings and meanings but its printed and handwritten forms, plus an animation of the stroke order!

This is currently in its initial phases, and doesn’t seem to have characters beyond the standard Joyo list, so its use is limited to students of Japanese rather than someone tracking down weird or obscure characters.

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Moving into more specialized areas, I have found it less helpful than ALC or Rikai, but Jeffrey’s Japanese < – > English Dictionary Server is worth nothing, if only for it’s extensive database of definitions. The site features minimal design, no graphics and search results are frustratingly ranked alphabetically, and not by best match.  Looking up “cute” in Japanese, kawaii appears eighth, after variations like ero-kawaii, “cute-sexy” and kakko-kawaii, “good looking-sexy”.

The true power of this dictionary is that it allows you to narrow your search by various fields, depending on what kind of translation you’re looking at. Categories include Legal Terms, Environmental Terms, Buddhist Terms, and even Japanese names, if you just need to learn how to read someone’s name.

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By far the best site I’ve found for checking name readings is the following (somewhat confusingly laid out) site:

全国の苗字

Click on 1.苗字検索 on the left hand menu, then enter any Japanese last name, and it will give you a list of possible readings. In order to be 100% sure you’re getting the right reading you should definitely double check on Google or, better yet, see if you can contact the person directly!

The same applies for the multiplicity of Japanese place names, which may be written identically but pronounced radically differently. When I first went to Japan as an exchange student I lived in an apartment in the Kyoto suburb of Yawata (八幡), which is commonly read as Hachiman, a prominent Japanese diety.  Luckily the Japanese postal service has a searchable database on their website for how to read place names. Plugging in “八幡” shows that while the correct pronunciation for the city in Kyoto Prefecture is yawata, Shiga Prefecture has a Hachiman City.

(For anyone starting to groan about the winding complexities of Japanese readings I’d like to call your attention to the towns of Greenwich, Connecticut and Greenwich, New York, just a three hour drive apart. The small town just north of Albany sounds like it’s spelled, green-witch, but the wealthy suburb of New York City is smooshed together as grennitch. And now you know.)

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We’ve started to move away from strict dictionaries, so to close up I’d just like to share a few databases and tools I’ve found extremely useful in translations.

Having done a fair bit of food related translation, I’ve constantly found myself stumped by the names of plants and animals from Japanese to English, especially when it seems like there is no real correllary. I’ve been lucky to stumble on a few bland and utilitarian dictionaries for biological types, usually hastily designed by some academic institution. This page features an impressive list of fish types, with common names in Chinese, Japanese and English, plus their latin equivalents. I have also been saved more than once by “Net Encyclopedia of Plants”, a clunky but rigorously throrough listing of plants by genus that includes photos and extensive descriptions.

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Whew, hope that wasn’t too dry and longwinded. I started to throw this thing together and it kept on growing. As I mentioned in the introduction this is by no means a complete list, feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!