Japanese translation for name on business card

[Armando Pena]

I have a business card that needs to have the person's name translated to Japanese, is there a way to do this with Javascript or any other way.

Thanks in advance for any assistance

[Dan Korn]

Well, first of all, there's no automatic magical translation algorithm, in any computer language. However, there are libraries and algorithms which have been programmed to translate particular words and phrases from one language to another, like Google Translate, although those are still not perfect, and cannot handle all the nuances of translation like a human who is fluent in multiple languages can.

 

Also, proper names are not something that can necessarily be translated anyway, since they can use just about any arbitrary sequence of letters. (Just like there's no way for a computer to determine what the proper capitalization of a name should be.) Furthermore, not all names originate in English in the first place. (For instance, I assume that your name originates from Spanish, and that your last name was originally Peña, not Pena.)

 

That said, I think what you want to do is not really translation, but transliteration. I assume that you want to come up with the phonetic equivalent of names in English (and other Western languages) in katakana, a Japanese phonetic alphabet. For instance, my name in katakana would be "ダン・コーン", which sounds like "dan kahn".

 

There are several JavaScript libraries which can do this. A Google search for "javascript english to katakana" turns up several interesting libraries, such as this:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/jp-conversion

 

This Stack Overflow page has some interesting links as well:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39830530/how-to-translate-japanese-kanji-to-katakana

 

The catch here is that although most of those libraries are designed to be used in the context of client-side web page development, and are built on top of other web-focused JavaScript libraries such as node.js. But it should be possible to extract the pure JavaScript parts you need to use in a FusionPro rule.

 

There is one other thing I can tell you about Japanese names on business cards: They often incorporate Ruby text, as well as vertical text. These features will be available in upcoming releases of FusionPro VDP Producer and Server. Please contact Support for information about utilizing these features in FusionPro VDP Creator.