Dear Friends,

I am in need of some assistance with Japanese. This is for an art project I'm working on. More likely than not, this would be easiest for any Japanese members here at MT to help with.

I've been trying to create a title in Japanese reminiscent of old school games. The English title is "Copic Fighter," which (to those unfamiliar) is referring to Copic markers. What I am trying to do, is to translate this into Japanese, which has turned out more complicated than I thought it would be.

I believe the way "Copic" is spelled in Japanese "kopishiku" (from what I could gather on the Japanese site).

And according to an online dictionary, "fighter" translates as "faita." But I have not been able to figure out how to write the prefix "fa."

Am I right in assuming that both words would be written in Katakana? Also, I thought if I could find a Japanese version of "Street Fighter" I would be able to see how "fighter" is written. But even the Japanese versions have the titles in English.

Any help with this would be appreciated. In advance, thank you so much!

street fighter is ??????????
that's sutorito fuaita
fight would be ?????

merged: 03-30-2007 ~ 12:34am
oh crap

well my source is http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=2759

Ha ha, yeah, I was going to post the actual Japanese text, but realizing that MT doesn't understand it I opted for just the romanji.

So I figured out that Copic Fighter would be "Kopishiku Fuaita." That helps tremendously. The only thing I'm not sure about yet is what the long dash-like character "--" is for. It's not Pronounced apparently, which I presume is some sort of punctuation or accent mark? So I'm wondering if I do indeed need to have it at the end of fuaita, like "fuaita-," but I'm not sure.

I'm sure there's a Japanese member here somewhere that would know .

Mantis has it right. If you are going for your title to sound in Japanese as it does in English, it should be written in katakana however that rule is broken ALL the time.the long dash is to make a sound longer(the sound just before the dash).
I'm no Japanese member desite the Japanese title but I hope that helped.

Thanks Kokujin. After some Googling, I found that same information on this Japanese writing site. They said pretty much the same thing...

Quote: chouon: This katakana character does not have its own pronunciation. It is used to extend the vowel sound that comes before it.

So yes, I think I've got it figured out now. Thank you so much for your help folks. I suppose I could have found this info all by myself, but I think it would have taken me longer that way.

If anybody's curious, the project I'm working on, Copic Fighter, I've previewed here.

Aa~ a small note before you do the writing! You mentioned that it was "Kopishiku". While it looks very similar to the "shi" character, that is actually the character for "tsu". If you will also notice, it is smaller than the other character. This denotes a double consonant, so instead of "kopitsuku" (which are the characters) it should be "kopikku". (And if you're interested-- soldier or "fighter" can also be translated into Japanese as "senshi" ) Hope that helps!

Here's a katakana chart: http://www.learn-japanese.info/katakana.gif

and if you're ever interested in an interactive hiragana one, let me know!

Thank you very much. That helps a lot. I did think that writing it at "kopishiku" was a little odd, so that makes much more sense .