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This article deals with transcription of English words into the nearest phonetic equivalent in Japanese. For the transcription of English words into Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters) please see Ateji . REASONS FOR TRANSCRIBING The purpose of the transcription partly determines how it is done. There are reasons why one would want to transcribe an English word to Japanese: Many legal documents, such as Company Registration s, require that only Japanese script is used. A computer Database may need entry in Japanese script for the purpose of sorting and collation. Educators want to explain the pronunciation of English words by transcribing. Loan Word s from English are usually written in a transcribed form. Or one may simply be interested in how one's name looks in Japanese. Accordingly, there are different priorities for the transcriber. The educator might want to indicate many of the subtleties of English pronunciation whereas a person naming a new product might be more concerned with the ease of pronunciation for Native Speaker s of Japanese. DIFFICULTIES Japanese distinguishes fewer sounds than English. For example, Japanese does not distinguish the Vowel sound of "run" and "ran". Moreover the rules by which sounds can be combined in Japanese are generally more restrictive than the English rules. As a result, the pronunciation of the transcribed word can differ quite considerably from the original word in English. If writing for a Japanese audience, it is worth checking whether there is already an accepted transcription into Japanese, and whether the meaning of the new word has changed in Japanese. The word ''mishin'' illustrates both pitfalls: not only is this an unexpected rendering of the English word "machine", but the Japanese word's meaning is limited to Sewing Machine s. It is also worth noting that some terms which may at first glance appear to be mangled English loanwords are, in fact, loans from other languages: ''koppu'' (drinking glass) is not a version of the English "cup" but a loan of Dutch ''kop'', and ''tabako'' is from Portuguese ''tabaco'', not from "tobacco". PROCEDURE FOR TRANSCRIPTION Most Japanese people do not use a systematic procedure for transcription; instead they transcribe according to their perception of the English pronunciation. However, the process can be represented formally as a set of transformations, which is presented in one possible order below. Proficient Japanese speakers internalize the transformations and perform them all simultaneously when inserting English words into written or spoken Japanese. Step 1: Transcribe the English phonetically The first step is to start with a phonetic representation of the English word, as distinct from the spelling. The Phonetic Transcription should reflect the careful pronunciation of the word. Spelling can often mislead as to what the pronunciation is. If there is any doubt, a dictionary will provide an accurate indication of what the sounds are. The letter ''x'' typically corresponds to two sounds (ks) and the digraphs ''sh'', ''ch'', and ''th'' correspond to a single sound. The English sounds in the examples below are in the International Phonetic Alphabet . (See International Phonetic Alphabet For English and IPA Chart For English for explanation of these symbols used for transcribing English.) Step 2: Transform the vowels from English to Japanese Japanese has a different and smaller sound set than English, so many sounds have to be changed to equivalent or similar sounds in Japanese. The Romanization system used here is a variation of the Hepburn system, where long vowels are represented by doubled letters (ii, ee, aa, oo, uu) and the moraic nasal is represented with capital N. Vowels need to be changed to correspond to use the five Japanese vowels. Typically, the vowels used in a British Received Pronunciation are used as the base English vowels for transcription, using the following system, where doubled vowels mean long (2-mora) vowels: In Rhotic dialects of English, ''r'' sounds at the end of syllables, but for the purpose of transcription into Japanese, this sound transcribes into a vowel sequence ending in ''a'', except for the sequence , which corresponds to Received Pronunciation , and is transcribed as ''oo''. That is, ''car'' becomes ''kaa'' not ''karu'', and ''pork'' becomes ''pooku'' not ''poruku''. Step 3: Transform consonants Some consonants require changing during transcription into Japanese. This process has three substeps: Transform non-Japanese sounds to closest Japanese equivalents First, English has a few consonant sounds that Japanese lacks, so they must be transcribed into sounds that Japanese has. Palatalize coronal obstruents Next, Japanese requires coronal obstruents "s", "z", "t", "d" to be Palatalized when they occur before the vowel ''i'', so if these consonants occur before "i", either they change to their palatalized form or the vowel "i" changes to "e":
In recent loanwords, "ti" and "di" are often preserved. In Kana , this sound is represented by a full-sized "te" or "de" and a small-sized "i": ティ (ti), ディ (di). Double voiceless obstruents after short vowels In Japanese, the voiceless obstruents "p", "t", "k", "s", "ch", and "sh" have geminate (doubled) forms, written using a Sokuon (small tsu) character, and in English transcription these geminates are used after short vowels. Short vowels are vowels which are transcribed using the vowel table above using a single vowel ("a", "e", "i", "o", or "u"). This transformation is usually but not always applied in the middle of a word. Also, sometimes syllable-final "t" is transformed to "ts" instead of "tt". Step 4: Add epenthetic vowels Japanese has strict constraints on the structure of syllables, and any syllables that violate these constraints have vowels inserted until the constraints are met. These are called Epenthetic Vowel s.
Any sequence of sounds that does not obey these rules must have epenthetic vowels inserted. The epenthetic vowel is usually "u", but there are a few exceptions:
The rule for "tsu" described above is sometimes replaced by one where "tu", written in kana with a full-sized "to" followed by a small "u": トゥ, is used. For example, the name of the film "The Truman Show" in Japanese is "トゥルーマン・ショー" (turuumaN shoo) Step 5: Break into morae Japanese is divided into Mora e, with each mora containing one of the following:
Step 6: Transcribe rōmaji into katakana Each mora corresponds to one or sometimes two katakana characters. The second mora of a long vowel is uniformly transcribed as ー in katakana. Moraic "n" (transcribed here as "N") is ン in katakana. EXAMPLES TRANSCRIBING MULTIPLE WORDS In some instances, such as language textbooks or song lyrics, phrases or entire sentences may be transcribed into Japanese. Multiple word transcription is typically done on a word-by-word basis, with no account being taken of word linking. For example, "an engineer" would most naturally be transcribed into Japanese as "a.n.e.n.ji.ni.a" rather than the more natural "a.ne.n.ji.ni.a", with the linking between the "n" and "e" represented by the Japanese mora "ne". In some set phrases, such as "kaman" for "come on", this general trend is broken. Example of transcribing a whole sentence English: "My hovercraft is full of eels." Step 1: Step 2-3: "mai hobaakraft iz ful ob iirz" Step 4: "mai hobaakurafuto izu furu obu iiruzu" Step 5 "ma.i ho.ba.a.ku.ra.fu.to i.zu fu.ru o.bu i.i.ru.zu" Step 6 「マイ ホバークラフト イズ フル オブ イールズ」 |
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