do you want it to actually be *legible* in Japanese, or just *look* Japanese?

I am not aware of any font that is constructed to actually change English to Japanese in that sense, because the Japanese language is constructed so differently...

For oriental "looking" fonts, you can check out www.dafont.com

i tried using a converter - english to jap - then pasting to word then pasting into illustrator- works ok but i have no clue whether or not it is actually real or not- my japanese is a little rusty!!

thought it would be easiler to type and have it come out in japanese??

if this is possible?

I don't speak japanese, but I do speak french. Unfortunately, changing the font will not change the meaning of the word.

For example, in french:

"a big black dog" would be "un grand chien noir" because the language is constructed following different rules... the literal translation back to english would be "a big dog black".

And considering that oriental languages use their characters to stand for entire words, or groups or letters, changing the font wouldn't do you any good. See what I mean?

I think that you would have to have it translated into japanese by an actual translator (I don't trust the online ones - they can give you some really bizarre results!)

wow, did that make ANY sense?

I seem to be having a hard time explaining!

Morea is right, you need to have this translated by a professional.

Here is my example. Thanks to Styx, we all know "domo arigato" means thank you very much. However, converting the text "domo arigato" to a Japanese font yields the characters "domo arigato" because the font INCLUDES our phonetical alphabet in addtion to the Oriental characters (which may be viewed by scrolling down the list of Glyphs, which are pretty impressive for the Oriental fonts). This is so Eastern translators can write things us dumb Westerners can understand. In order to translate to "domo arigato" to true Japanese characters, you have to know what character or characters represent the phrase "domo arigato", and either chose those characters from the list of glyphs - or type it in using your Oriental characters keyboard. The true translation will be probably only 2 or 3 characters, not 4 a space and 7 more characters.

English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Grecian, Cyrillic (Russian alphabet) - and many more languages are based on the ancient Phoenician alphabet which came from the Mediterranean area - and is based on characters which represent the individual sounds which make up a word - this makes them similar enough to be able to translate without too much difficulty. This is why most languages only have an alphabet of around 30 characters which happen to use many of the same characters. Japanese and Chinese alphabets don't necessarily represent the individual sounds and are comprised of hundreds of characters - more closely related to heiroglyphics than our alphabet.

Oftentimes, when you receive translations for true oriental languages, it shows up as a bunch of goofy looking computer language characters - only when you convert it to an eastern font will it look right.

thank you for saying what I was trying to say in a way that could be understood!!!

I wont be able to get that song out of my head now ... secret secret, I've got a secret . . .

Hey gypetto,

Just post the text and the type of font you want, and I'll do it for you.

Taka-

wow, that's a very generous offer Taka.

thanks Takayuki for the generous offer -
all it is - is "japanese import" in the most user friendly style

Does your word "import" mean importing goods from japan, if so it is called
"日本輸入" . Will this do it?? if not say no, and I will look into it more.

Cheers
Taka-

yeah import as in goods from japan-
is that just import or does it cover "japanese import"?
ill put this into the template just now- thanks a million