Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Nick Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.beginners Subject: Re: kanjii and ascii strings Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 23:12:44 -0700 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 20 Message-ID: <358369DA.14C7@home.com> References: <35832fab.36036290@news.playstation.co.uk> Reply-To: porcino@home.com NNTP-Posting-Host: cs1000396-a.gvob1.bc.wave.home.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01-C-SYMPA (Macintosh; I; PPC) You can't easily convert from kanji to ascii or vice versa if what you want to do is to transliterate between Japanese characters and English characters (commonly referred to as Romanji). If you want to go from Shift JIS (the most commonly used Japanese character set) to Romanji, you'll need a Shift JIS decoder - a good place to start would be JDic at the monash Nihongo archive. If you want to go from Romanji to Shift JIS you'll need an expert system because there are so many homonyms in Japanese that the only way to go from Romanji to Japanese characters is by doing context sensitive translation - and even then it is necessary to have a human in the loop to double check the results of the translation. That's why if you go to babelfish at altavista, they translate between all sorts of European languages, but not to Japanese. If you write such an expert system, you could sell it for thousands and thousands of dollars! The two most common in use right now are Kotoeri on the Macintosh, and the Japanese IME on Windows. The code isn't available! -nick