Thursday, August 31, 2006

Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved

Alan Siegrist, a professional Japanese-English translator, member of both Japan Association of Translators (JAT) and American Translators Association (ATA), has finally solved the mystery of gibberish “Asian Font”.

With Alan’s help, I have compiled this following chart:



Obviously the characters themselves might be correct and have meanings in both Chinese and Japanese.

However, the characters have nothing to do with the English alphabet, yet many tattoo shops consider this template as a valid translation tool, and using it to translate English names and words into Chinese and Japanese.

Alan has also mentioned:

"There are no equivalents for the letters V and W. This looks like the right side of , but is the closest full character I can find. This looks like the radical in the top-right of . This looks like the radical in the bottom-left of . * The character for "Y" is a mystery, looking something like 米米産 as one character.

If you look carefully, you will note a pattern of where the partial radicals come from:

(C) = (D) + (A)
(G) = (I) + (H)
(N) = (O) + (P)
(R) = (T) + (S) "

We have also found an actual website that is still currently selling this gibberish "Asian font" along with some other designs for $64.99.


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