Japanese Indices

When translating an alphabetized index at the end of a manual, etc. into Japanese, there is a need to re-sort the entries in the index into the order of the Japanese alphabet (hiragana).

However, unlike English, Japanese is basically a combination of three types of characters: kanji, hiragana and katakana. Furthermore, a kanji has more than one “reading” and is read differently according to how it is used. Sorting an index using DTP software and other tools simply rearranges the Japanese words into the order of the Japanese character code. This is not necessarily the proper order. For this reason, additional work, such as manual inspection, rearrangement of entries in the list or entry of phonetic readings (hiragana or katakana), are required.


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