You can’t blame your tattoo artist if things don’t mean what you thought they did you certainly can’t expect them to look at a block of hanzi and tell you that you've misspelled one of the characters, the same for any language tattoo if your tattoo artists doesn't know French they won’t be able to tell you the right way to translate your quote into beautiful French words, the best they can do is use Google translate and that isn't always accurate enough to give you the message you wanted. Of course finding a similar word with a nice meaning is not entirely easy to do and does require a fair amount of research, prior knowledge can also be useful. For example if your name is Hannah you couldn’t write that in Japanese, but you could use the kanji 花, this is read ‘hana’, so sounds very similar when spoken but actually translates as flower. There is no way of writing a typical English name in Kanji or Hanzi, though there are sometimes options that are similar. This was most commonly used to spell out names or words but had no real bearing on the meanings of the characters, most of which do in fact have real meanings in body Japanese and Chinese, but appear as nothing more than gibberish when put together.įor one thing names don’t get translated into other languages.
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The ‘Asian’ font or ‘gibberish’ font as it is sometimes called is something that was distributed through tattoo studios and American tattoo parlours during the early 80s when the Asian character tattoos first became more popular. Everyone hears the horror stories of foreign language tattoos, the sort where people actually end up with part of a Chinese takeaway menu tattooed down their back and in most cases what you end up with is actually just gibberish. One thing that you should know before going to get your new tattoo, is that your tattoo artist is probably not a linguistics expert they don’t just know every hanzí and kanji and they probably don’t have any reason to learn them, if you want to use them you should do the research yourself, but do so carefully and thoroughly to avoid making mistakes.