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| [[Image:Romanization minelba.jpg|right|211px|thumb|Minerva; hypercorrecting "r" into "l", while somehow retaining the "b" from Japanese phonemes. Oh, Takara.]] | | #REDIRECT[[Japanese language]] |
| '''Romanization''' refers to the adaptation of languages or words that do not use Latin letters to the 26-character Latin alphabet used in English (among other, less important languages). Technically, the English-specific term would be "Anglicization".
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| The proper Romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant.
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| In fandom the term Romanization is frequently (and incorrectly) used to refer to Japanese misspelling of English words.
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| ==Japanese and English==
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| Any writing system is (at best) an approximation of the sounds it represents. The Japanese writing system distinguishes between fewer [[Wikipedia:Phoneme|phonemes]] than most. This does not mean the language ''lacks'' those phonemes... English has more than 26 sounds, which is denoted by character-combinations ("ch" makes a sound that is not the combination of the mouth-movements for "c" and "h", but a close cousin), but even those combinations are imperfect; the double-o represents different sounds in "cook" and "spook".
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| Notably the Japanese script does not distinguish between the sounds "l" and "r", and English-speaking Japanese lack a mechanism for distinguishing the sounds in other languages. Foreign words in Japan frequently acquire ''creative'' spellings as a result of being rendered "down" into the Japanese script then re-Romanized; in such situations "[[Engrish]]" is a perfectly logical rendering. Accuracy is generally a low priority, as English characters are ''generally'' used to look cool, not make sense to Japanese children.
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| In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country. [[Drift (G1)|And it's happened back-to-front in Transformers, now]].
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| {{see|Wikipedia:Romanization of Japanese}}
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| ==Notorious and hilarious Romanizations in Transformers==
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| Romanization confusion can either be;
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| # Improper Japanese rendering of English names
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| # Words whose English spelling is open to interpretation.
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| * Minelba—Minerva
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| * Butt—[[Blot (G1)|Blot]]
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| * Clerken—[[Kraken]]
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| * "Comvoy", used on the packaging for ''[[Transformers: Mystery of Convoy]]''
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| * Variations of "[[Decepticon|Destron]]", including "Deathtron" and "Destoron"
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| * [[Deathsaurus (Victory)|Deszaras]]
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| * [[Rartorata]]
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| * [[Transformers Collection]] [[Kup (G1)|Chear]]
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| * A questionable case would be the various Japanese [[Mirage (G1)|Mirage]] toys named "Rijie" (''[[Robot Masters]]'', ''[[Alternators (toyline)|Binaltech]]'')—although the character's name was based on the original toy's vehicle mode, a Ligier racing car, Takara's insistence on using a Romanization of the name that's considerably different from the car manufacturer's name might hint at a willful decision.
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| [[Category:Fandom]]
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