Japanese ⇄ English Translator

The translation is, and only the translation. Machine translation needs a model far too large to run in a web page, so when you pause typing your text is sent to MyMemory, a free public translation service, directly from your browser. Everything else — the readings, romaji, kanji breakdown and typing guide — runs on your device. Do not paste anything confidential, and switch off "Translate as I type" if you would rather send text only when you choose.

Good for everyday sentences and unreliable for anything subtle, like any free machine translation. The tool shows the service's own match score so you can see whether a result came from a close match in its translation memory or from raw machine translation. Never submit a machine translation as your own work without checking it.

Because machine translation returns whatever register happens to sit in its memory, and for English input that is often the plain form — 行く rather than 行きます. Plain form is fine between friends and wrong for an email, a form, a shop, or anyone you have just met. So a plain-form result is rewritten into ですます form and labelled as adjusted, with a toggle to see exactly what the service returned. Past-tense plain forms are left alone and marked, because rewriting those confidently needs more than these rules can do.

Standard Hepburn, with macrons for long vowels: 環境 is kankyō and 東京 is tōkyō, as they appear on road signs and in passports. Macrons are only applied inside a single word, so 思う stays omou — the う there is the verb ending, not a long vowel. The typing guide keeps the keystroke spelling, since you cannot type ō.

Kana readings are exact, because kana map to sounds one-to-one. Words in the bundled vocabulary are reliable. Beyond that, a run of two or more kanji is read with the on'yomi of each character — which is how Sino-Japanese compounds work — and marked approximate, because compounds sometimes shift sound. The regular shifts are handled: 設定 comes out せってい rather than せつてい. Personal names are the weak spot, since their readings cannot be derived from the kanji at all and have to be listed one by one.

Because the word is not in the bundled vocabulary. Generating readings for arbitrary Japanese needs a morphological analyser and a dictionary of hundreds of thousands of entries — a multi-megabyte download. Rather than ship that or guess, the tool marks what it does not know.

It could, so the tool is built not to. It waits for a pause in your typing rather than firing on every keystroke, ignores fragments too short to be meaningful, and reuses any phrase it has already translated — so backspacing and retyping costs nothing. You can also turn live translation off and translate on demand.

Add Japanese as an input source — System Settings → Keyboard on macOS, or the Language settings on Windows — then switch to it with Control+Space or Windows+Space. Type the reading in romaji and press space to convert to kanji. The typing guide on this page shows the exact letters for whatever you translated.