General Question

mea05key's avatar

Need someone to help me to translate this japanese sentence?

Asked by mea05key (1812points) January 27th, 2010

Please click the bottom url to see the text.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesyeoh1985/4309418979/

Thank you.

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10 Answers

absalom's avatar

It’s a name – Christopher.

lilikoi's avatar

Yep, I second this. It is katakana, which is what Japanese use for foreign words.

mea05key's avatar

i tried searching on hiragana and katana table . It seems like the sentence contains words from both tables. I can’t find the 4th and 6th word pronouciation. Absalom, do you mind writing down the sound of each characters for me?

Can anyone provide kanji words for the text as well?

It would take me hours to search, instead if someone is familiar with japanese words probably could do it in seconds . Onegai!

absalom's avatar

It’s all katakana, as @lilikoi said.The font is kind of stylized, though, so that’s probably why you’re having trouble finding the characters on katakana tables.

Using romaji the syllables would be Ku-ri-su-to-fu-a. So your fourth character is to, pronounced like the English toe. The sixth character is a, pronounced like ahh.

Japanese generally don’t write foreigners’ names with kanji. I suppose you can find kanji whose pronunciations are close to what you’re looking for, but it would probably just confuse readers.

For example, my name is Nick. In Japanese katakana I write it as Ni-ku. Now, there are words in Japanese that are pronounced as niku, such as the word for meat. But I don’t use the kanji for meat when I write my name because 1) I don’t want to be associated with meat (lol) and 2) it’s kind of confusing to do that.

Hope that helps some.

jamcanfi74's avatar

use google translator to translate most stuff

ekans's avatar

@absalom your analysis is mostly correct, except on one point. the ア is actually small, like ァ, so it doesn’t produce any sound by itself, but it changes the sound of the character before it. In this case, it is from fu(フ) to fa(ファ). Also, the line at the end just means that the last syllable is elongated.
Other than that though, great answer.

lilikoi's avatar

^^^ this.

Fyrius's avatar

@mea05key
They’re not words, they’re syllables.

absalom's avatar

@ekans

Thanks for clarifying that. I knew the ァ changed the sound of the フ but I didn’t realize it technically lacked its own sound.

MRSHINYSHOES's avatar

Those are Japanese phonetic symbols which provide the sound to a word, in this case, a name I believe——Christopher. The Japanese use both Chinese characters, where each character stands for a word with a meaning, and phonetic symbols derived from Chinese calligraphy which stand for sounds with no meaning, unless strung together to make a word or a sentence.

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