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Thread: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

  1. #11

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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Sawyer View Post
    "Your exposures will bring people great happiness. In bed."
    Longer exposures will bring greater happiness.

  2. #12
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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    Quote Originally Posted by richardman View Post
    I read Chinese (Kanji). There's one kana there, and the wording is backward, but I am 99% sure that it says "Do not use force".
    Perhaps you are reading the か as 力.

    My rusty Japanese read " kabine yoo " ... "For cabinet use"...i have no idea what that means.
    Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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  3. #13

    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    Quote Originally Posted by BetterSense View Post
    Perhaps you are reading the か as 力.

    My rusty Japanese read " kabine yoo " ... "For cabinet use"...i have no idea what that means.
    What happened to the stroke on the top right if it is か? And aren't katakana written with curved strokes? Is that hiragana?

  4. #14
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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    I didn't mean [the glyph]か. I rather meant [the syllable]か. "か" is pronounced "ka" My brain read it as か. To me it looks like かびね用 or カビネ用. In Japanese 力 is a kanji meaning literally power or energy and カ is a kana pronounced "ka". They look the same. Yes it's retarded but I can't fix Japanese.
    Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
    --A=B by Petkovšek et. al.

  5. #15

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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    Japanese was written right to left to some extent pretty much up to WW II

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizo..._Asian_scripts

    This poster announcing the opening of the Ginza Subway line in 1927 is written right to left

    Click image for larger version. 

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    It says East West Unique/Only Under Ground RailRoad (Although it's from right to left so Road Iron Under Ground Unique West East) and the second line says it 's initiating the connection of Ueno and Asakusa

    Japanese is remarkably insensitive to character order - when writing on a vehicle it often starts at the front on both sides. The writing on the camera back uses Katakana - the Katatkana for Ka doesn't have the little apostrophe that Hiragana has, otherwise they're the same. and as was mentioned, the names of temples are commonly written right to left on the sign over the entrance.

    And it gets worse - there are times a three character string needs to be read starting with the middle character and then the leftmost and then the rightmost - it's an un-godly mess! Surprisingly they have one of the highest literacy rates anywhere and bookstores are popular.

  6. #16

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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    Jim and Oren are correct

    It is katakana "ka bi ne" and kanji "you"

    Hiragana and katakana were derived from kanji which were brought in from China

    They have a very complex system of writing, thousands of characters are in common use, a few can look similar especially if you don't know what you're looking at

  7. #17

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    Re: Translation of Japanese/Chinese Writing

    And by the way, the "yoo" (用) is commonly used to designate a usage - in other words "for" in the sense of "use for Kabine" in this case or for example "常用漢字" (jooyookanji) or the standard set of common use Kanji characters. Or 凡用 (bonyoo) = general purpose.

    Probably more than anyone wanted to know. Or as the story goes, when the teacher asked the class why "Moby Dick" was great literature, one of the students answered that it was great literature because it told him more about whales than he wanted to know...

    And to this day the Ginza line is color coded yellow just like it was in 1927

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