Create Your Own Engrish!

 

Few easy steps and you are off to creating your own Engrish. The possibilities are endless:

PC Users:

Step 1: Come up with some regular English text that you would like to see formatted in Engrish.

Step 2: Go to http://babelfish.altavista.com and type or paste your selected English text and scroll down to the "English to Japanese" translation selection in the bar. Click "translate".

Step 3: Assuming you have Japanese language support*, your Japanese translation will appear as text. Highlight the Japanese text, copy and paste back into the box below it (erase the original text first), scroll the adjacent bar to "Japanese to English" and hit "translate" once more. Your Engrish should appear.

* Note: Works only with PC's equipped with browsers that are enabled to read Japanese text. Should work with most Windows XP computers, but users of an older Windows OS may require a download (free) from Microsoft to support Japanese (quite often this can be done by simply clicking on "Windows Update" within Internet Explorer - download "Japanese Language Support"). Babelfish does not seem to work with Macintosh computers when translating back from Japanese to English.

Mac Users:

Same as PC users, but the process can be done easily within the Sherlock program - part of the Mac OSX system (Sherlock uses the same translation software as Babelfish - Systran). Just open up Sherlock and hit the "translation" button, and the process is the same. English to Japanese back to English. You may have to install Japanese fonts into your system to get it to work, but OSX supports Unicode text.

The longer and more complicated the sentence, the better it works (or doesn't work...). Have fun!