Building a Japanese-Chinese Dictionary Using Kanji/Hanzi Conversion

A new bilingual dictionary can be built using two existing bilingual dictionaries, such as Japanese-English and English-Chinese to build Japanese-Chinese dictionary. However, Japanese and Chinese are nearer languages than English, there should be a more direct way of doing this. Since a lot of Japanese words are composed of kanji, which are similar to hanzi in Chinese, we attempt to build a dictionary for kanji words by simple conversion from kanji to hanzi. Our survey shows that around 2/3 of the nouns and verbal nouns in Japanese are kanji words, and more than 1/3 of them can be translated into Chinese directly. The accuracy of conversion is 97%. Besides, we obtain translation candidates for 24% of the Japanese words using English as a pivot language with 77% accuracy. By adding the kanji/hanzi conversion method, we increase the candidates by 9%, to 33%, with better quality candidates.