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| {{cleanup|20 April 2013|This may be more in depth than we really need. Also, the grammar of editor of this page's additions is rather poor. I have made a few corrections, but am not familiar with the actual topic.}}
| | #REDIRECT[[Japanese language]] |
| [[Image:Romanization minelba.jpg|right|211px|thumb|Minerva; hypercorrecting "r" into "l", while somehow retaining the "b" from Japanese phonemes. Oh, Takara.]]
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| '''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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| ==Japanese==
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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". Japanese is a bit hard to romanize is because its writing systems, ''Kana'' (Katakana (カタカナ) and Hiragana (ひらがな)) and ''Kanji'', have no official romanization. So, many people romanize Japanese based on the sounds they hear.
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| Kana is a syllable script, this means its not using one sound per symbol like Latin scripts but two sounds per symbol, like ど ''do'', は ''ha'', ぐ ''gu'', and け ''ke''. Kanji (感じ) is Chinese character-like, well, this is hard to explain. Better go to [[Wikipedia:Kanji|Kanji]].
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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 Romaji in Transformers===
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| Romaji 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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| * [[The Transformers Collection|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 (franchise)|Robot Masters]]'', ''[[Transformers: Alternators|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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