Listed below is a small selection of past and present projects I have been involved in and which I feel have evolved to the stage where they may be of some use to people other than myself. On the off chance that this might be the case, I have made these projects available to anyone curious enough to want to take a look.

Status: Idle     (last updated May 2006)

A web-based, Japanese input method editor utilising a number of advanced web technologies including real-time DOM manipulation and the XMLHttpRequest API, a combination more commonly referred to as AJAX.

Lime was created to serve users requiring the ability to input Japanese text on systems that do not support a Japanese input method. This is an all-too-common scenario when using a computer that is not one's own; for example, when at work or otherwise away from home. Using Lime, text can be input in a natural and familiar manner, before being copied to where it is needed.

Status: Offline     (last updated April 2006)

An experiment in natural language machine translation of news headlines from Japanese to English, 4Gamer.net Watch grew from an abandoned project I worked on in conjunction with a university dissertation. The three-layer translation model, which lay at the core of the now-defunct project, was something that I had invested a considerable amount of time in developing. I was eager to revive it and put it to use. 4Gamer.net watch let me do that, while having a little fun at the same time. :)

4Gamer.net Watch is an English language front-end to the Japanese gaming site, 4Gamer.net. It captures RSS headline data from 4Gamer.net, translates the last 50 headlines, and assembles them into a simple, easy-to-read format. Bear in mind that the translation core is highly experimental and still under heavy development. The quality of the translations will vary considerably and you may find no translation at all given for some headlines. It's certainly not ready for everyday use, but I'm making it available for anyone who is curious. For more information on the translation technology at work behind the scenes, take a look at the page entitled About 4Gamer.net Watch.

Status: Idle     (last updated January 2006)

A searchable database of Japanese-English sentence pairs, using data compiled by Yasuhito Tanaka and made available by Jim Breen. The database also makes use of the EDRDG's EDICT dictionary to provide translations for individual words.

Although the nature of the database conceivably makes it of some use to Japanese students of English, this tool is really only intended for students of the Japanese language. How you use it is up to you; perhaps you're interested in the workings of a particular grammatical structure, or maybe you're trying to write a letter but aren't sure how to go about translating a certain phrase.

Development on Japanese by Example has been suspended for the time being; implementing the additional functionality I would like to see would take more time and effort than I am willing and able to commit to the project. Nevertheless, I expect I'll eventually get around to updating some aspects of the site. It's worth noting that in the last couple of years, a number of groups and individuals have created similar tools for exploring Tanaka's corpus of example sentences, so it is no longer the untapped learning resource it once was. However, despite its limited functionality, Japanese by Example endeavours to be a fairly capable, and above all, easy-to-use tool, so feel free to give it a go if it piques your interest.