A Method for Converting Onomatopoeic Words in Japanese Comics into Chinese Based on International Phonetic Alphabet

Japanese comic is one of the important sources of spreading Japanese culture all over the world. Japanese comics are being read by people in many countries. In order for foreign readers to understand the contents of comics in more detail, a multilingual conversion processing method on Japanese onomatopoeic words is required. This paper proposes a method to convert Japanese onomatopoeic words in comics into Chinese based on a phonetic distance between Japanese and Chinese. The method calculates the phonetic distance between a mora of Japanese onomatopoeic word and an onomatopoeic character of Chinese using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA). The method chooses an onomatopoeic character for each mora. Then, the method puts the chosen characters in the same order of moras and outputs the ordered characters as a conversion result. We carried out evaluation experiments with the proposed method. As a results, 22 out of 30 (=74%) conversions were judged as suitable by experimental subjects.