Do machine transliteration websites exist?


Are there web sites that transliterate Japanese text (katakana, hiragana and
kanji) into romaji characters without translating the words into the English
language?

(Note to moderators: I'm merely asking a yes/no question, not asking what
someone's favorite transliterator is)




You can try [Google Translate](http://translate.google.com/#)'s 'read
phonetically' or 'listen' options.

If you need/want an offline tool as well
[mecab](http://mecab.sourceforge.net/) can do this, among other things. For
example, if I enter これはミーカッブの変換機能テストです, it can produce:

[code]

    これ    指示詞,名詞形態指示詞,*,*,これ,これ,*
    は      助詞,副助詞,*,*,は,は,*
    ミーカッブ      名詞,普通名詞,*,*,*,*,*
    の      助詞,接続助詞,*,*,の,の,*
    変換    名詞,サ変名詞,*,*,変換,へんかん,代表表記:変換
    機能    名詞,サ変名詞,*,*,機能,きのう,代表表記:機能
    の      助詞,接続助詞,*,*,の,の,*
    テスト  名詞,サ変名詞,*,*,テスト,てすと,代表表記:テスト
    です    判定詞,*,判定詞,デス列基本形,だ,です,*
    EOS
    
[/code]

With the right command-line flags it will produce raw hiragana. It can,
however, be quite confused if it comes across words not in its dictionary.




I don't know of a website that does this, but I do know of software that does
it. A Japanese guy in the early 2000s created something called "kana2rom". It
had been long neglected.

My coworker rescued it, transformed it slightly, and it is now a [Ruby open
source project on GitHub](https://github.com/LongWeekend/kana2rom/). Buyer
beware - programming required to get it up and running, but it was used to
fully translate all of the hiragana in each EDICT entry to romaji for my
company's Japanese study software.

