8 ms·

Cutlet: A Japanese to Romaji Converter in Python

42 points by polm23 6y ago

asutekku 6y ago
While I’m not a huge fan of romaji itself, I disagree with converting foreign words from their japanese spelling to their original spelling. It might be easier for foreigner to understand the word, but at the same time no japanese will ever understand if you talk about cutlet curry instead of katsukaree. And that’s something i’d guess this would be used in; reading something out loud you don’t know how to read.
- hakka-nyu-su 6y ago
  I also wonder if the author had non-English origins of words in mind. Ex., to how many people is it useful to convert アルバイト from "arubaito" to "Arbeit", especially when the Japanese word has a different connotation to the German (part-time work vs occupation)
  - knolax 6y ago
    Or if it's a word where the source language doesn't use the Latin Alphabet. I have low confidence in the accuracy of a Tamil ---> Katakana ---> English conversion.
  - glandium 6y ago
    Another example of loan word not meaning the same thing as the original word: ズボン means trousers, comes from the French jupon, which means... underskirt.
- lgessler 6y ago
  I don't know Japanese, but aren't there also cases where you would want the original spelling? Glancing at a list of English loanwords in Japanese, I'm guessing that for words like batā 'butter' or chāji 'charge' you could plausibly want the original instead of the romaji. Perhaps it's hard to say much more without knowing who these transliterations are supposed to serve. If it's a general Japanese-speaking population with limited knowledge of English, I'm not sure whether they'd prefer romaji or the original spelling.
- numpad0 6y ago
  “Cutlet curry” is actually better, back-romanization(?) like “katsukaree” is just confusing. Real world example[0] 0: https://images.app.goo.gl/KA47TTXbdQNfoYVs5 https://images.app.goo.gl/KA47TTXbdQNfoYVs5
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    It's better based on what criteria?
    - numpad0 6y ago
      There are very little real world uses for kana romanized word typed out in English alphabet. Words are either romanized into katakana, or original forms in source languages is inserted similar to how formulas appear in English text. There are plenty real world examples for “Beef curry” and “ビーフカレー” used in pairs in Japanese, katsu is usually an extra so it’s rarer though.
  - glandium 6y ago
    Ironically, OP itself contains "Katsu curry" which is a half-back-romanization. I myself am not too sure what to think about カツ becoming Cutlet when カツ is a shortened version of カツレツ, which itself is the katakana version of Cutlet. Technically, カツ would be Cut, but then English doesn't have that notion of using Cut to mean Cutlet.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  A couple weeks ago I ran into some third party code with translated Japanese comments where "debadora" was left as untranslated romaji. I was puzzled and couldn't find it at first but a little search magic revealed that it is a contraction of "debaisu doraiba" which I suspected was the case. Converting this back to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable. You can't always reconstruct the original words by playing with the pronunciation.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > I ran into some third party code with translated Japanese comments where "debadora" was left as untranslated romaji. I was puzzled and couldn't find it at first but a little search magic revealed that it is a contraction of "debaisu doraiba" which I suspected was the case. Converting this back to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable. Translating debadora to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese. Then again, translating いとこ to "cousin" is also the only way to make that understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese (and does speak English), but the goal is to transliterate it as "itoko", not to translate it as "cousin". Like it or not, the Japanese word is "debadora".
    - aikinai 6y ago
      No, the Japanese word is デバドラ. Once you translate or transliterate it, you’ve diverged from the original and there are choices to be made with different answers depending on context and intent. The example above of “sale” is a good one. In a Japanese shop for Japanese and by Japanese, you will see “sale” but you will never see se-ru.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        >> Like it or not, the Japanese word is "debadora". > No, the Japanese word is デバドラ. False; these are one and the same claim, not two conflicting claims. > Once you translate or transliterate it, you’ve diverged from the original Again, this is wrong. If your "transliteration" has diverged from the original, it's not a transliteration. A transliteration is a reflection of the original, just using a different orthographic system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration
- fenomas 6y ago
  TFA says this is optional, but it's a good default. The general case for most loan words is that even native Japanese speakers will find the English spelling much more familiar than romanization. E.g. in any Japanese shop you'll see signs that say "sale" or "bargain", but you'd never see "se-ru" or "bāgen" -- writing that way looks as strange to JP speakers as to anyone else. "Cutlet" strikes me as an edge case, considering that "katsu" has more or less become a word in its own right. So, perhaps an unfortunate choice of name for this project...
- aikinai 6y ago
  Why would you expect this to be used for pronunciation? That’s exactly where it wouldn’t make sense. But it would be much better for semantic understanding by non-Japanese speakers, or titles and such like my example in another comment.
- Zarel 6y ago
  As the article points out, this is intended to be used for URLs. Converting foreign words to their original spelling is the convention in Japan when transliterating to English. https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/biggangan/ https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/biggangan/ For instance: notice that this says "big gangan" rather than "biggu gangan" (which is how you'd transliterate ビッグガンガン). Also notice the other labels: "PRESENT", "twitter", "BIGGANGAN OKAWARI".
rootsudo 6y ago
Not the best because many kanjis can be transliterated the same into to romaji and lose meaning. For web dev, I think it's probably fine.
wodenokoto 6y ago
I just want to chime in and say that the author knows what he is talking about when it comes to Japanese and NLP. Like many other commenters, I am also not sure why you’d want “katsu” transliterated to “cutlet”, but the author didn’t choose to have a tool to do this out of ignorance of the Japanese language.
- ihadfun 6y ago
  Because katsu means cutlet, a thin slice of meat. Tonkatsu for example is pork cutlet.
  - wodenokoto 6y ago
    Transliteration is not translation.
    - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
      From Wikipedia, that's technically and etymologicaly correct : "The cutlet was introduced to Japan during the Meiji period, in a Western cuisine restaurant in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo. The Japanese pronunciation of cutlet is katsuretsu. In Japanese cuisine, katsuretsu or shorter katsu is actually the name for a Japanese version of the Wiener schnitzel, a breaded cutlet. Dishes with katsu include tonkatsu and katsudon."
      - wodenokoto 6y ago
        TIL, but in my defense, an abbreviation of a transliteration, which has come to mean something slightly different should probably be considered a new word and not be transliterated back into its etymological ancestor.
- polm23 6y ago
  Author here, thanks for the vote of confidence! Regarding the name, it's true that the word "cutlet" isn't typically an example of where you'd want to use the foreign spelling functionality. However it had several other nice points: 1. It follows the tradition of naming Japanese language tools after food the author likes, like MeCab, Sudachi, my own fugashi, etc. 2. It has a concrete image that's easy to convey, which is useful mnemonically 3. It's a very clear demonstration of the foreign spelling feature (even if not a useful one) 4. The word "katsu" is a good example for showing the difference between Hepburn and other romanization systems (katsu/katu)
junar 6y ago
Obviously, language learners should never use this. They should take a week or two to learn kana, and use a furigana tool instead. I'm also pretty unconvinced of the article's stated purpose of "readable" URL text. I spot checked a few Japanese news sites (Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi), and none of them try to do this. The URLs just have random alphanumeric article IDs. I don't think romaji is valuable for most readers, who probably find it more effort to decipher it than to simply read the Japanese text in the title.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- christiansakai 6y ago
  I don't think this is targeted for language learners.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    It’s in English though, not Japanese...
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Romaji is quite valuable for search engines, which is why most CMSes use them instead of IDs.
- labster 6y ago
  Can you suggest a good furigana tool? I’m interested, I probably only know 30 kanji or so.
  - polm23 6y ago
    Check japanese.io for a recent product. I haven't used them in years but rikai-chan or rikai-kun used to be relatively useful; it looks like there's a newer thing called yomi-chan too. If you're comfortable with Python you should be able to use fugashi to throw together a tool pretty quickly, I've though about doing it before but never got around to it.
ekianjo 6y ago
That's not a converter if you mix both translation and 'kanji to romaji' at the same time in the same word. That's like mixing two sets of tools in one when only one was needed.
Hamuko 6y ago
>One of my main motivations for making this library was dealing with the frequent case where using Japanese text isn't an option for technical reasons, or it is an option but comes with downsides. The annoying thing is that the Japanese are equally quilty of this. I live in Finland so Ä/Ö are used; I have never ever found a single Japanese online store that accepts Ä/Ö in input (not even Amazon.co.jp). Add a name and address and you're suddenly give a "Please enter only English characters" error. You'd think the Japanese of all people would know how annoying it is when systems accept a very limited amount of character sets.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  I wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to some key system somewhere using Shift-JIS or EUC-JP, leading to the restriction to ASCII-ish Latin characters.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  “English characters” are a part of the Japanese written language at this point, so it makes sense from that perspective. They’re consistent in supporting their own written language, far less so any others.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Not really. I'm using Amazon.co.jp in English and I can't enter my address in katakana. Full-width ASCII is also out. Only A-Z here. It's kinda strange since Amazon.co.jp is really easy and handy for international shopping since you can even use it in English. They even precollect the Finnish VAT and DHL ships stuff from there super fast (package leaves Japan on a Friday, is at my door on Monday).
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      I agree that it’s silly Amazon Japan doesn’t support this, but was speaking to the broader point that “Japanese, of all people, should know...” Failing to provide support or consideration to out-groups is a quite common feature of Japanese society. Difficulties arising from those situations tends to be blamed on those on the receiving end of them for being “other.”
aikinai 6y ago
This is amazing! Years ago I wrote a script to convert my music library to romaji for my car that would show non-English characters as ?????. So many titles were really just English titles in katakana that come out as gibberish. I had my own hacky exception override dictionary and the script ending up being like 70% exceptions. If Cutlet had been around, this would have been exactly what I needed.
KayL 6y ago
Recently, working on a tool and find it difficult to implement `fugashi` (the engine behind this tool) to work with `deplacy`.
- polm23 6y ago
  Hello, thanks for trying fugashi. I'm the developer. Note that the most recent version of spaCy, 2.3, uses sudachipy instead of fugashi, so maybe that's the source of your problem. If you are having trouble with fugashi, always feel free to open an issue (and note it's fine to write in Japanese).
reedwolf 6y ago
Related: What Python would look like in Japanese: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/g9iu8x/concept_art_what_might_python_look_like_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/g9iu8...
woodandsteel 6y ago
I'm an American and a few years ago I started getting into Japanese musicians (Senri Kawaguchi, Kanade Sato, Yoyoka Soma, Rie Suzaku, Juna Serita and others). This got me into reading a little about how the Japanese write and it's crazy. They have four different systems. There is Kangi which is from Chinese. There are two different systems that are phonetic but based on syllables rather than single sounds. And finally they use the Roman script like we do. It must be really hard on the elementary school kids who are trying to learn this all.

42 points by polm23 6y ago

While I’m not a huge fan of romaji itself, I disagree with converting foreign words from their japanese spelling to their original spelling. It might be easier for foreigner to understand the word, but at the same time no japanese will ever understand if you talk about cutlet curry instead of katsukaree. And that’s something i’d guess this would be used in; reading something out loud you don’t know how to read.

hakka-nyu-su 6y ago
I also wonder if the author had non-English origins of words in mind. Ex., to how many people is it useful to convert アルバイト from "arubaito" to "Arbeit", especially when the Japanese word has a different connotation to the German (part-time work vs occupation)
- knolax 6y ago
  Or if it's a word where the source language doesn't use the Latin Alphabet. I have low confidence in the accuracy of a Tamil ---> Katakana ---> English conversion.
- glandium 6y ago
  Another example of loan word not meaning the same thing as the original word: ズボン means trousers, comes from the French jupon, which means... underskirt.
lgessler 6y ago
I don't know Japanese, but aren't there also cases where you would want the original spelling? Glancing at a list of English loanwords in Japanese, I'm guessing that for words like batā 'butter' or chāji 'charge' you could plausibly want the original instead of the romaji. Perhaps it's hard to say much more without knowing who these transliterations are supposed to serve. If it's a general Japanese-speaking population with limited knowledge of English, I'm not sure whether they'd prefer romaji or the original spelling.
numpad0 6y ago
“Cutlet curry” is actually better, back-romanization(?) like “katsukaree” is just confusing. Real world example[0] 0: https://images.app.goo.gl/KA47TTXbdQNfoYVs5 https://images.app.goo.gl/KA47TTXbdQNfoYVs5
- ekianjo 6y ago
  It's better based on what criteria?
  - numpad0 6y ago
    There are very little real world uses for kana romanized word typed out in English alphabet. Words are either romanized into katakana, or original forms in source languages is inserted similar to how formulas appear in English text. There are plenty real world examples for “Beef curry” and “ビーフカレー” used in pairs in Japanese, katsu is usually an extra so it’s rarer though.
- glandium 6y ago
  Ironically, OP itself contains "Katsu curry" which is a half-back-romanization. I myself am not too sure what to think about カツ becoming Cutlet when カツ is a shortened version of カツレツ, which itself is the katakana version of Cutlet. Technically, カツ would be Cut, but then English doesn't have that notion of using Cut to mean Cutlet.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
A couple weeks ago I ran into some third party code with translated Japanese comments where "debadora" was left as untranslated romaji. I was puzzled and couldn't find it at first but a little search magic revealed that it is a contraction of "debaisu doraiba" which I suspected was the case. Converting this back to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable. You can't always reconstruct the original words by playing with the pronunciation.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I ran into some third party code with translated Japanese comments where "debadora" was left as untranslated romaji. I was puzzled and couldn't find it at first but a little search magic revealed that it is a contraction of "debaisu doraiba" which I suspected was the case. Converting this back to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable. Translating debadora to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese. Then again, translating いとこ to "cousin" is also the only way to make that understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese (and does speak English), but the goal is to transliterate it as "itoko", not to translate it as "cousin". Like it or not, the Japanese word is "debadora".
  - aikinai 6y ago
    No, the Japanese word is デバドラ. Once you translate or transliterate it, you’ve diverged from the original and there are choices to be made with different answers depending on context and intent. The example above of “sale” is a good one. In a Japanese shop for Japanese and by Japanese, you will see “sale” but you will never see se-ru.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      >> Like it or not, the Japanese word is "debadora". > No, the Japanese word is デバドラ. False; these are one and the same claim, not two conflicting claims. > Once you translate or transliterate it, you’ve diverged from the original Again, this is wrong. If your "transliteration" has diverged from the original, it's not a transliteration. A transliteration is a reflection of the original, just using a different orthographic system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration
fenomas 6y ago
TFA says this is optional, but it's a good default. The general case for most loan words is that even native Japanese speakers will find the English spelling much more familiar than romanization. E.g. in any Japanese shop you'll see signs that say "sale" or "bargain", but you'd never see "se-ru" or "bāgen" -- writing that way looks as strange to JP speakers as to anyone else. "Cutlet" strikes me as an edge case, considering that "katsu" has more or less become a word in its own right. So, perhaps an unfortunate choice of name for this project...
aikinai 6y ago
Why would you expect this to be used for pronunciation? That’s exactly where it wouldn’t make sense. But it would be much better for semantic understanding by non-Japanese speakers, or titles and such like my example in another comment.
Zarel 6y ago
As the article points out, this is intended to be used for URLs. Converting foreign words to their original spelling is the convention in Japan when transliterating to English. https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/biggangan/ https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/biggangan/ For instance: notice that this says "big gangan" rather than "biggu gangan" (which is how you'd transliterate ビッグガンガン). Also notice the other labels: "PRESENT", "twitter", "BIGGANGAN OKAWARI".

rootsudo 6y ago

Not the best because many kanjis can be transliterated the same into to romaji and lose meaning. For web dev, I think it's probably fine.

wodenokoto 6y ago

I just want to chime in and say that the author knows what he is talking about when it comes to Japanese and NLP. Like many other commenters, I am also not sure why you’d want “katsu” transliterated to “cutlet”, but the author didn’t choose to have a tool to do this out of ignorance of the Japanese language.

ihadfun 6y ago
Because katsu means cutlet, a thin slice of meat. Tonkatsu for example is pork cutlet.
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  Transliteration is not translation.
  - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
    From Wikipedia, that's technically and etymologicaly correct : "The cutlet was introduced to Japan during the Meiji period, in a Western cuisine restaurant in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo. The Japanese pronunciation of cutlet is katsuretsu. In Japanese cuisine, katsuretsu or shorter katsu is actually the name for a Japanese version of the Wiener schnitzel, a breaded cutlet. Dishes with katsu include tonkatsu and katsudon."
    - wodenokoto 6y ago
      TIL, but in my defense, an abbreviation of a transliteration, which has come to mean something slightly different should probably be considered a new word and not be transliterated back into its etymological ancestor.
polm23 6y ago
Author here, thanks for the vote of confidence! Regarding the name, it's true that the word "cutlet" isn't typically an example of where you'd want to use the foreign spelling functionality. However it had several other nice points: 1. It follows the tradition of naming Japanese language tools after food the author likes, like MeCab, Sudachi, my own fugashi, etc. 2. It has a concrete image that's easy to convey, which is useful mnemonically 3. It's a very clear demonstration of the foreign spelling feature (even if not a useful one) 4. The word "katsu" is a good example for showing the difference between Hepburn and other romanization systems (katsu/katu)

junar 6y ago

Obviously, language learners should never use this. They should take a week or two to learn kana, and use a furigana tool instead. I'm also pretty unconvinced of the article's stated purpose of "readable" URL text. I spot checked a few Japanese news sites (Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi), and none of them try to do this. The URLs just have random alphanumeric article IDs. I don't think romaji is valuable for most readers, who probably find it more effort to decipher it than to simply read the Japanese text in the title.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
christiansakai 6y ago
I don't think this is targeted for language learners.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  It’s in English though, not Japanese...
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
Romaji is quite valuable for search engines, which is why most CMSes use them instead of IDs.
labster 6y ago
Can you suggest a good furigana tool? I’m interested, I probably only know 30 kanji or so.
- polm23 6y ago
  Check japanese.io for a recent product. I haven't used them in years but rikai-chan or rikai-kun used to be relatively useful; it looks like there's a newer thing called yomi-chan too. If you're comfortable with Python you should be able to use fugashi to throw together a tool pretty quickly, I've though about doing it before but never got around to it.

ekianjo 6y ago

That's not a converter if you mix both translation and 'kanji to romaji' at the same time in the same word. That's like mixing two sets of tools in one when only one was needed.

Hamuko 6y ago

>One of my main motivations for making this library was dealing with the frequent case where using Japanese text isn't an option for technical reasons, or it is an option but comes with downsides. The annoying thing is that the Japanese are equally quilty of this. I live in Finland so Ä/Ö are used; I have never ever found a single Japanese online store that accepts Ä/Ö in input (not even Amazon.co.jp). Add a name and address and you're suddenly give a "Please enter only English characters" error. You'd think the Japanese of all people would know how annoying it is when systems accept a very limited amount of character sets.

zerocrates 6y ago
I wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to some key system somewhere using Shift-JIS or EUC-JP, leading to the restriction to ASCII-ish Latin characters.
claudeganon 6y ago
“English characters” are a part of the Japanese written language at this point, so it makes sense from that perspective. They’re consistent in supporting their own written language, far less so any others.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Not really. I'm using Amazon.co.jp in English and I can't enter my address in katakana. Full-width ASCII is also out. Only A-Z here. It's kinda strange since Amazon.co.jp is really easy and handy for international shopping since you can even use it in English. They even precollect the Finnish VAT and DHL ships stuff from there super fast (package leaves Japan on a Friday, is at my door on Monday).
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    I agree that it’s silly Amazon Japan doesn’t support this, but was speaking to the broader point that “Japanese, of all people, should know...” Failing to provide support or consideration to out-groups is a quite common feature of Japanese society. Difficulties arising from those situations tends to be blamed on those on the receiving end of them for being “other.”

aikinai 6y ago

This is amazing! Years ago I wrote a script to convert my music library to romaji for my car that would show non-English characters as ?????. So many titles were really just English titles in katakana that come out as gibberish. I had my own hacky exception override dictionary and the script ending up being like 70% exceptions. If Cutlet had been around, this would have been exactly what I needed.

KayL 6y ago

Recently, working on a tool and find it difficult to implement `fugashi` (the engine behind this tool) to work with `deplacy`.

polm23 6y ago
Hello, thanks for trying fugashi. I'm the developer. Note that the most recent version of spaCy, 2.3, uses sudachipy instead of fugashi, so maybe that's the source of your problem. If you are having trouble with fugashi, always feel free to open an issue (and note it's fine to write in Japanese).

reedwolf 6y ago

Related: What Python would look like in Japanese: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/g9iu8x/concept_art_what_might_python_look_like_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/g9iu8...

woodandsteel 6y ago

I'm an American and a few years ago I started getting into Japanese musicians (Senri Kawaguchi, Kanade Sato, Yoyoka Soma, Rie Suzaku, Juna Serita and others). This got me into reading a little about how the Japanese write and it's crazy. They have four different systems. There is Kangi which is from Chinese. There are two different systems that are phonetic but based on syllables rather than single sounds. And finally they use the Roman script like we do. It must be really hard on the elementary school kids who are trying to learn this all.