Japanese to English audio translator

English needs a subject and Japanese often leaves it out. “ブリスベン・オープンでラオニッチに敗れています” names nobody; our test translation chose “they were defeated”, where a human translator wrote “he”. When who did it matters, check the lines before it in the transcript.

The transcript goes to the translation in batches of neighbouring lines, so the person named a sentence earlier usually settles it. A remark heard on its own, like a short voice message, is where a guessed “he”, “she” or “they” is likeliest.

In kanji, hiragana and katakana, with no spaces and often little punctuation: in our test, more than half the clips came back without a single 。 or 、. The English is built from those lines, so its sentences can be joined or split differently from the speaker’s.

The English follows the wrong kanji. Many Japanese words share a reading, and our test transcript once wrote 時期判定 (timing) where the speaker said 磁気反転 (magnetic reversal); the English then translated the word on the page. If a line reads oddly, its time takes you to the recording.

Most of the test recording came through cleanly: “Rolando Mendoza fired an M16 rifle at tourists” and “head to the waterfront in Kowloon” were right, names included. In our test of whole recordings, Japanese speech scored lower in English than most languages, though the meaning came through.

NoteOwl understands Japanese on your Mac. It gives you unlimited transcription of Japanese calls and recordings, a name for every voice, and a memory you can search by what was said. Need only the Japanese, untranslated? Try Japanese audio to text.