A single-file browser tool that transliterates Japanese kana (ひらがな and カタカナ) into four romanization and cyrillization systems at once. Anything that is not kana (漢字, Latin letters, digits, punctuation, emoji) passes through untouched.
Open Kana-Transliterator.html in any modern browser, or use the hosted copy at https://html-js.github.io/kana-transliterator/. There is no build step, no server, and no network request. Every conversion happens locally in the page.
The other three systems on the same sample
Cyrillic (Polivanov):
French (conventional):
German (conventional):
The tool offers four target systems, shown one at a time or all together via the "All 4" button.
Cyrillic uses the Polivanov system, the standard academic cyrillization of Japanese used in Russian. Hepburn (ヘボン式) is the most widely used Latin romanization. The French and German columns are conventional habit spellings rather than codified standards: French tends to write ou for う and é for え, while German writes sch for し and j for や.
Conversion works at the mora level. Palatalized yōon such as きゃ or しゅ map to a single unit, the sokuon っ geminates the following consonant, and the prolonged sound mark ー repeats the previous vowel. Loanword-only combinations like ふぁ or てぃ are covered too. Katakana is normalized to hiragana internally before lookup, so both scripts work. Any character with no kana mapping is copied straight to the output, which lets you paste mixed text and see only the kana change.
Beyond conversion there is an uppercase toggle, a copy-output button, a sample loader, and a clear shortcut (Ctrl/Cmd+K). A small status line reports the input length, how many kana mora were converted, and the output length.
Open the HTML file in a browser, paste or type text into the left panel, and read the transliteration on the right. The "Copy output" button puts the result on your clipboard.
Sample input / output
Input:
はじめましてですね
こんにちは、世界！ Hello 123 🎌
キャリーぱみゅぱみゅ / がっこう / コーヒー / ラーメン
東京タワー (Tōkyō) は綺麗です。ABC-DEF。
The Hepburn output keeps every non-kana character (漢字, Latin, digits, emoji) exactly as typed and rewrites only the kana.
The output is best-effort and should not be treated as authoritative. Only kana are converted; kanji are never read or romanized, so they pass through as-is. The French and German columns are approximate by nature, since they follow common habit rather than a published standard. Even for Polivanov and Hepburn, ambiguous readings and loanword conventions may not match every style guide.
Where an incorrect reading would cause real harm (official documents, personal names, legal or academic citation), have the output checked by someone fluent in the target orthography before relying on it.
Released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, © 2026 Aesthetic Vulpes.
BibTeX
@software{kana_transliterator,
author = {Aesthetic Vulpes},
title = {Kana Transliterator: Cyrillic / Hepburn / French / German},
year = {2026},
url = {https://github.com/html-js/kana-transliterator}
}