Transcribing English to Japanese
The transcription of English to Japanese has been done since the earliest cultural contacts between English speakers and Japanese. During the Edo period, kanji were used phonetically to write English and other foreign words, but in the modern period katakana have become the principal target script. Unlike the systems for romaji, there is no standard for transcribing into katakana, and methods vary. However, generally all methods attempt to preserve the pronuciation of English, not the spelling. That is, transcription not transliteration is done.
The purpose of the transcription partly determines how it is done. There are reasons why one would want to transcribe an English word to Japanese: Many legal documents, such as company registrations, require that only Japanese script is used. A computer database may need entry in Japanese script for the purpose of sorting and collation. Educators want to explain the pronunciation of English words by transcribing. Loan words from English are usually written in a transcribed form. Or one may simply be interested in how one's name looks in Japanese.
Accordingly, there are different priorities for the transcriber. The educator might want to indicate many of the subtleties of English pronuciation whereas a person naming a new product might be more concerned with the ease of pronunciation for native speakers of Japanese.
Japanese distinguishes fewer sounds than English. For example, Japanese does not distinguish the vowel sound of "run" and "ran". Moreover the rules by which sounds can be combined in Japanese are generally more restrictive than the English rules: Japanese allows "ja" and "ji", but not "je". As a result, the pronunciation of the transcribed word can differ rather a lot from the original word in English.
The first task is the write the word to be transcribed phonetically. The phonetic transcription should reflect the careful pronunciation of the word, and avoid slurring. So "Kate" becomes "keit" and "reform" becomes "ri:fo:m" (with ":" indicating a long vowel")
Japanese has five vowels: "a", "i", "u", "e", "o". All the vowels have long and short forms.
Some consonant sounds that do not exist in Japanese have to be changed.
Reasons for transcribing
The difficulties
Methods for transcription
Most Japanese people do not use a system for transcription; instead they transcribe according to their perception of the English pronunciation. However the process can be formalized, as below.1. Write the word phonetically.
2. Simplify the vowels.
3. Simplify the consonants
Other changes can be made if the ease of pronunciation for native speakers of Japanese is a high priority.
4. Split consonant groups and add vowels to terminal consonants.
5. Break into mora and transliterate