The GITS Blog

Here's a cool Flash game called "Verbatim" that tests your ability to read obscure kanji compounds and English words (I did best at that).
After the time is up, it creates a mecha-robot for you. The more you got right, the cooler your robo.

Just a month after writing about how agencies should give translators direct access to their clients, an agency asked me to go with them to meet their client for a big new job.
The back story
The end client had been burned a couple of times by horrible translations. So they contracted with this new agency, on [...]

A question on StackOverflow about converting kanji numbers (e.g. "五十五") into integers in C++ got me interested in solving this using Python.
The result is my kanjinums module, with a function kanji2num that will convert a string containing a kanji num to a Python integer.
Download the source distribution (kanjinums-0.1.zip)
Download the Windows installer (kanjinums-0.1.win32.exe)
Download the unit tests [...]

When dealing with full-width (especially CJK) characters, you'll often want to know the type of a particular character — Kanji/Hanzi/Hanja, hiragana, katakana, and so on.
wchartype is a Python module that will determine the type of a full-width character. The functions all expect Unicode strings of length one.
Usage:

import wchartype
if wchartype.is_asian(u'\u65e5′):
    print u"\u65e5 is an Asian [...]