simple Japanese<=>German Translator

The dictionary contains about 1650 vocables which were taught in Japanology classes at the University of Tuebingen in Winter Term 2001 and Summer Term 2002. Since I entered much of the data at a really late time and the original vocabulary list was Japanese/English the dictionary is probably far from being error-free.

When someone finds an error or has questions about the dictionary and the translator, please use this address to contact me by e-mail.

The dictionary can be downloaded from my University Page.

Since I entered the vocables in a non-Japanese-capable vocabulary trainer which I used to practice Japanese the vocables are in Pseudo-Romaji. By Pseudo-Romaji I mean to say that you don't search for the pronounciation (as in Romaji) but for the Hiragana/Katakana, i.e.:

• wo, not o
• ei, not ee, ou, not oo
• There are both wa and ha. wa should only be encountered when it has the purpose of either marking the topic or emphasizing on a word.
• No visible distinction between Katakana and Hiragana, original Hiragana/Katakana transcription is not always clear (n-i, ni): Regrettably, at the beginning I didn't know enough to start with a perfect transcription, so I made a big mistake here which cannot be corrected without a LOT of time. :-(

But for the very least my Pseudo-Romaji has one advantage: You don't need an Japanese-capable browser or Japanese support in your system to use the translator.

Since the simple database modul provided by Strato is programmed in an extremely minimalistic way, the result page doesn't only look ugly but also doesn't provide the encoding charset of the page. Since this results in viewing errors in some browsers I converted the Umlaute as follows: Ü to Ue, ß to ss, Ä to ae etc. As soon as Strato takes care of this little issue, there will be Umlaute ;-)

The search is always a substring-match, thus when searching for e.g. uma you will find uma, kuruma etc. However, I would ask you to use as many letters as possible since very short search terms increase the size of the result page and hence puts more (unnecessary) load on the server.

Probably, most of the time you will be fine just using one of the search fields (Deutsch/Japanisch). However, if you can restrict your search further, e.g. because a part of the answer is already known ("I think it also had the meaning of Kugel..."), you can use both search fields at a time; the result will be composed of the word combinations.