Japanese to English
Translate a Japanese book into English, and keep the Japanese
Have a Japanese novel, light novel or essay collection that was never translated, or whose translation you want to check? Upload it and get it back with English beside every paragraph, so you can read the English and glance at the Japanese, or read the Japanese with the English as a safety net.
吾輩は猫である。名前はまだ無い。
I am a cat. As yet I have no name.
どこで生れたかとんと見当がつかぬ。何でも薄暗いじめじめした所でニャーニャー泣いていた事だけは記憶している。
I have not the faintest idea where I was born. All I remember is mewing in some dim, damp place.
How it works
Upload the book, choose English, and look at the free preview of the opening pages, side by side. If it reads well, translate the whole book and read it in the browser, or download it as a PDF, an EPUB, or a Kindle file. More about translating a book.
Where to find Japanese books
Aozora Bunko has thousands of public-domain works, from Sōseki and Akutagawa to Dazai, free to download. Ebooks bought from Japanese stores are usually locked to the store's app; a DRM-free EPUB, a PDF with selectable text, a text file or an HTML page all work.
Reading Japanese with English beside it
The subject the sentence left out
Japanese often drops who is speaking or acting, and any English translation has to guess. With the original beside it you can see where the translation filled a gap, and decide for yourself whether it guessed right.
Prose, not pictures
It reads the text of a book. Manga and other comics are pictures with text inside, so they are not a fit; novels, light novels, essays and non-fiction are.
Check your file first
Japanese ebooks come in many shapes: vertical text, ruby readings over the kanji, text files with their own markup. The free preview translates the opening pages, so you see how your file comes out before you spend anything.
Questions
Can I translate a Japanese light novel into English?
Yes, if you have it as a DRM-free EPUB, a text-based PDF, a text file or an HTML page. Upload it, choose English, and check the free preview of the opening pages before translating the whole book.
Is the translation good enough to read a novel?
It is a machine translation made to read alongside the original: good for following the story and for checking a passage, not a polished literary translation. That is why the Japanese stays beside it.
Can I read it the other way round, Japanese with English as the help?
Yes. The same book can be read with either side first, and you can hide the English until you want it.