The English-Teacher-in-Japan's Mac Toolbox 4 For the foreigner newly arrived in Japan, nothing beats a good bilingual dictionary. And unless you've already mastered the Japanese writing system, you will probably want one that has alphabetized pronunciation of Japanese words so you can sound them aloud. I still remember when I first came to Japan and the kerosene that fueled my room's heater ran out. I checked my dictionary and found that kerosene is called "toyuu" in Japanese, checked my Japanese textbook's shopping chapter and found that asking for things is "____ kudasai," and I was all set. Muttering "Toyuu kudasai . . . toyuu kudasai . . ." under my breath so as not to forget, I set off down the street carrying my red plastic fuel can. You can imagine my delight when my careful "Toyuu kudasai" produced desired results at the gas station. Within minutes I was back home with a full fuel can and able to remove the early-spring chill from my one-room apartment. Success!

When hand-held electronic dictionaries first came out in Japan they were designed exclusively for Japanese students of English, and didn't show any pronunciation for the Kanji (pictogram character) translations, meaning that they were almost useless to beginning and low-intermediate students of Japanese. I'm told that electronic dictionaries are more foreigner-friendly now, but I've gotten by with my traditional book-form dictionary, along with software for my Mac that is not only a dictionary, but also a full-fledged translator of phrases, sentences and paragraphs.

Translation software is notoriously bad. When my students rely on software or online translation sites, they submit sentences like, "It went to Tokyo. Soba was eaten." That's because Japanese often relies on contextual or conversation flow cues to communicate the subject of the action; it doesn't require a grammatical subject to the degree that English does. In other words, in Japanese people say, "Went to Tokyo. Ate soba," and this is perfectly natural and correct. The listener or reader infers that it is the speaker who went to Tokyo, and that soba is what he or she ate. Not all that difficult for humans to figure out, but just about impossible for a computer. Having more detailed information to begin with, maybe English to Japanese translation is slightly easier for the computer. I'm not sure.

In any case, a translation sofware title called Korya Eiwa 2005 has been a great help to me in my work and in my life in Japan. Today I'd like to share that with you.

Korya Eiwa 2005 for the Mac is published by Logovista. It boasts a number of functions that are particularly useful for those working with both Japanese and English, though the program is not currently marketed toward English speakers. It's far too feature-rich to explain everything here today, but I'd like to give you just a sample of what it can do.

Korya Eiwa can put a Smiley icon in your menu bar allowing you to access its functions easily and without interrupting your workflow. Click on the icon and this is what you'll see:Type a word or phrase into the window, and press return or click on the far left button （一発）and you'll see results below almost instantly. Korya Eiwa knows if you've typed a single word, in which case it looks it up in the dictionary.Here, the dictionary offers a number of translations for the English word book both as a noun and as a verb.

If you type in a phrase or sentence, the software opens the translation panel and offers (only one, unfortunately) a Japanese or English translation, depending on what you typed in.
The final piece of the puzzle is English to Japanese webpage translation.

If you type in an internet address, or drag a URL from the address window in Safari or Internet Explorer, Korya Eiwa will translate the English webpage into Japanese when you click the Browser Translator （ブラウズ翻訳）button on the bar, hit the return key, or hit one of the four buttons at the bottom of the above window. The button with the blue E slightly higher than the red J yields this result:The original English remains, but under each English title or paragraph you can see Korya Eiwa's best efforts at Japanese.

The button that has the E and J perfectly side by side provides yet another possibility: This is the same webpage as above, only now all the graphics have been removed and the original English text and Korya's Japanese translation are side by side, sentence by sentence. This is great for checking the accuracy of the translation with a bilingual friend.

The final mode I'll address today is the HL button for webpage translation, which translates only titles and HTML links. This can also be useful.

There is much more to Korya Eiwa 2005 than I've outlined here. But all is not peaches and cream. I find the Japan-centric nature of a product which could be equally useful for non-Japanese studying the language annoying. Why is there no option for an English language interface? Why are there no instructions in English in the manual? Why are help panels available only in Japanese?

Clearly Logovista intends that this product be used primarily by Japanese people. They seem to forget that Japanese is one of the most popular foreign languages for students around the world. Having created a Japanese-English translation product, one assumes that they have skilled English speakers that could whip up an interface, a manual and help panels in a matter of days. That they don't seems to me narrow-minded, and perhaps even a bit chauvinistic. Non-Japanese don't count, it seems to say. On the other hand, maybe they just fear having to offer product support in English, though as I wrote above, they ought to have enough English speakers around, especially since nearly all of their software is translation and dictionary stuff.
Korya Eiwa is a terrific dictionary and translation program with an amazing number of useful features. Users without significant ability in Japanese, though, will face a daunting task in installing the software, deciphering the manual and then using the software.

Amazon sells Korya Eiwa 2005 for a very reasonable ¥7352, though it is not clear whether they can ship outside Japan. The Logovista website at first glance seems to sell a download version of Korya Eiwa, but on further investigation they just introduce a number of other stores that sell the product. In my experience trying to buy Korya Eiwa a few months ago, the download version was only available for Windows platform. I ended up ordering the boxed version. Once again, I can't confirm availability outside Japan. Even online download sales are often geographically restricted based on your credit card billing address. If you know where to buy this product in the US, Canada or Europe, please let me know.

It's also important to remember the limitations of MT. Computers can be a useful step in the hard work of translating between Japanese and English, but people have to be the final judge, whichever way you are translating. I was quite offended once when the telephone company responded to my e-mail request for billing information with a MT'd English answer that had obviously not been checked in even the most cursory fashion by a human. (It took me several days to work out that "following moon bill" meant "next month's payment.")

We are easily decades away from true human-free computer translation. In the meantime, Korya Eiwa can be a valuable addition to your English-Japanese communication arsenal. Drop me a note if you use this program and let me know if you like it or hate it. Happy translating!___  ¶ 10/27/2005 02:31:00 PM