Transcription into Japanese

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Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Kyōiku kanji Jōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji List of kanji by stroke count
Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn (colloquial) Kunrei (ISO) Nihon (ISO transliteration) JSL (transliteration) Wāpuro (keyboard)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

In contemporary Japanese writing, foreign-language loanwords and foreign names are normally written in the katakana script, which is one component of the Japanese writing system. As far as possible, sounds in the source language are matched to the nearest sounds in the Japanese language, and the result is transcribed using standard katakana characters, each of which represents one syllable (strictly mora). For example, America is written アメリカ (A-me-ri-ka). To accommodate various foreign-language sounds not present in Japanese, a system of extended katakana has also developed to augment standard katakana.

Katakana, like hiragana, has a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and characters. Therefore, once the "Japanese sound" of a word is established, there is no ambiguity in its katakana spelling (unlike spelling in English, for example).

A much less common form of transcription, Ateji, uses kanji characters for their phonetic values.