44 Are There Online Japanese Dictionaries?
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This article is from the Anime Music FAQ, by Ru Igarashi with numerous contributions by others.
44 Are There Online Japanese Dictionaries?
Some of us are brave enough to attempt to transliterate (convert one kind of characters to another) and translate the track listings and other information from our anime CDs. However, it is not as simple as grabbing a dictionary and plugging in the English equivalents. You need to know some grammar, to know what the form changes are, what is a name and what isn't, where one word ends and another begins, for example. This subject is beyond the scope of this FAQ, but once you have learned some Japanese, it's possible to get quite far. But you need to deal with 3 different character sets: the simplified katakana and hiragana, and the pictographic (and extremely numerous) Kanji. That makes sifting through dictionaries more of a job in cryptography than straight translation. Online dictionaries can be a lot of help, both to get you started and to get words that aren't in those J<->E and Kanji dictionaries spread over your desk.
Jeffrey's Japanese<->English Dictionary Server http://www.solon.org/cgi-bin/j-e/dict/
mirrored at http://rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/dict/ Highly configurable, has multiple search strategies.
Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdicinf.html Large body of resources.
Just between those two, you get a potent coverage of all sorts of tranliteration and translation problems.
For translating Japanese web pages, try
Babelfish http://babelfish.altavista.com/ Be aware that names get mangled with this as it doesn't distinguish names from ordinary words.
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