For those of us wishing to read japanese pages

I have recently decided that I will resurrect my studies in japanese - I did 5 years worth while at highschool... but like most highschool students I didn't really pay attention, and didn't take it seriously. While having a look for any online resources to help me, I came across
this site , which lets you enter a URL and instead of doing a half-assed babelfish-esque translation job, will display the page in original japanese but provide tooltips over all phrases detailing potential readings.

For example, I put in http://am.sega.jp/ , and the tooltips underneath the first entry in the "what's new" section (for 1/14) describe the phrases as: "hand to hand fighting" - "new century" - "nomination, preliminary contest" - "list" - "update".

these are all literal translations, but it is helpful enough to get the basic idea of what has been written - The list of entrants (or list of qualifiers?) for this tournament has been updated.

Sure, it isn't perfect.. but this is probably the best automated japanese translation service online I've seen yet.

 

.. and here is another one I just came across, also very good.
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx

 

I use popjisyo a lot... it's not perfect, but it's really great for what it is... makes you lazy though...

This: http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~jwb/wwwjdic.html is also the best dictionary ever... JDIC ... I put up the Japanese mirror but there are plenty all over the world... use and abuse it my son... =)

Edit: Dude, Rekai.com is like miles better than popjisho... and not only that, but now it's embedded in my firefox browser... MONEY =) It looks up words much better than popjisyo because you can control exactly what it selects... also the shift right-click thing that brings up the Kanji info (radicals, etc) is genius ... thanks for the link man!