Romanization

Modern-day Japanese Transformers packaging with properly romanized names alongside their katakana spelling, leaving nothing to interpretation.

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".

The proper romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant.

Japanese: Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji

Any writing system is, at best, an approximation of the sounds it represents. The modern Japanese writing system distinguishes between fewer [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}phoneme|{{#if:||phoneme}}]]s than most, but this does not mean the language lacks those phonemes, merely that different sounds can be represented by the same symbols. English has more than twenty-six sounds denoted by character-combinations (ex. "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 "oo" letter sequence represents different sounds in "cook" and "spook". While Japanese does have official romanization systems, such as the [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Nihon-shiki romanization|{{#if:Nihon-shiki|Nihon-shiki|Nihon-shiki romanization}}]], it can still be difficult to romanize a Japanese word to match its author's intent due to the sharing of phonemes and other artifacts of the differences between the English and Japanese languages. Kana can be written using two native alphabets: the "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}hiragana|{{#if:||hiragana}}]]" script used primarily for Japanese words, and the "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}katakana|{{#if:||katakana}}]]" script used primarily for loanwords or foreign words.

Kana is a primarily syllabic script; with the exception of six kana, each symbol represents a consonant-vowel pair, such as ど do, は ha, ぐ gu, and け ke.

Hiragana (left) and Katakana (right) – k s t n h m y r w a あア かカ さサ たタ なナ はハ まマ やヤ らラ わワ i いイ きキ しシ ちチ にニ ひヒ みミ * りリ ゐヰ u うウ くク すス つツ ぬヌ ふフ むム ゆユ るル * e えエ けケ せセ てテ ねネ へヘ めメ 𛀁𛀀 れレ ゑヱ o おオ こコ そソ とト のノ ほホ もモ よヨ ろロ をヲ

んン (n)

These basic kana are in turn modified by the "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}dakuten|{{#if:||dakuten}}]]" (゙ ), which resembles a quotation mark and transforms a voiceless kana such as "ka" into a voiced "ga" and changes the soft "f-" series into the "b-" series; and the "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}handakuten|{{#if:||handakuten}}]]" (゚ ), which resembles a degree sign and modifies the soft "f-" series of kana into the hard "p-" series.

Due to the influence of the Chinese language, Japanese also uses "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Kanji|{{#if:||Kanji}}]]", logographic symbols that represent specific concepts. These kanji often have two pronunciations, one the Japanese word for the specific concept (訓読み kun'yomi) and another based on the borrowed Chinese word (音読み on'yomi), but can sometimes have additional pronunciations. Single kanji can also be compounded into more complex concepts; for example, the Japanese word for telephone, "Denwa" is made up of the symbols "電話", which separately mean "electric" and "talk".

Due to its separate development, the Japanese language does not share the same focus as English on certain sounds such as "l", "f", or "v", among several others. To approximate these sounds, Japanese generally uses phonemes from the "r-", "h-", and "b-" series of kana. Unfortunately, this can lead to ambiguity as to which sound is truly intended, often resulting in a phenomenon called "Engrish", when a translator not familiar enough with English under- or over-romanizes a Japanese word (usually based on a foreign word to begin with) into English or another Western language. Foreign words rendered "down" into the Japanese script and then re-Romanized frequently acquire creative spellings as a result, with such hilarious results as "Thanks for Fisiting Us" instead of "Thanks for Visiting Us". For full phrases, this is further compounded by the disparate grammatical structure of Japanese which, unlike English, has a separate word order, frequently omits subjects, and lacks articles. The situation isn't helped at all by the fact that, often, the English characters are used merely for an aesthetic purpose or to appear "exotic", making literal accuracy a low priority.

In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country. And it's happened back-to-front in Transformers, now.

For further information, see: Wikipedia:Romanization of Japanese

Romanization difficulties with regards to Transformers

The man with many names, all of which are the same.

Romanizing a name isn't always easy.

Actual Japanese people can often have their names romanized in several ways, all of which are, by default, equally valid: For example, Kōjin Ōno (大野 光仁 Ōno Kōjin) can also be romanized as "Kojin Ohno" or "Kouzin Ono". Japanese people who frequently interact with the Western world may settle for an "official" version for simplicity's sake; in that case, insisting on using an alternate romanization would be considered pedantic and ignorant.

Since the vast majority of Transformers names used for the Japanese market are English or English-derived, romanizing them isn't particularly difficult— for example, Megatron's Japanese name (メガトロン Megatoron) is simply a transliteration of his Western name; the same applies to Thundercracker (サンダークラッカー Sandākurakkā). Many characters whose names were changed for the Japanese market are still easy to decipher; for example, Jazz traditionally becomes "Meister" (マイスター Maisutā), Sideswipe becomes Lambor (ランボル Ranboru), and Optimus Prime becomes Convoy (コンボイ Konboi).

One problem is posed by the Japanese use of the plural, which doesn't use an "s"-suffix like it does in English. Thus, the Japanese name for the overall brand is literally "Transformer" (トランスフォーマー Toransufōmā). However, since Takara uses the spelling "Transformers" every time the name is rendered in English, the plural-"s" can be assumed to materialize in the transition from katakana to the Latin spelling in much the same way Optimus Prime's trailer appears and disappears every time he transforms. This doesn't always apply, however; some English-derived names with a plural in it may in fact keep the "s"-suffix in their katakana spelling, such as Generations (ジェネレーションズ Jenerēshonzu), resulting in an inconsistent appearance in the combination "Transformers: Generations", where "Generations" uses the plural-"s" but "Transformers" doesn't.

Most likely on purpose.

More complicated are names that are based on puns that work in Japanese but not in English. Any romanization of such a name is going to miss out on at least half of the pun. Notable examples would be Kiss Players "Autorooper" (オートルーパー Autorūpā), a portmanteau of "auto" (オート auto) and "trooper" (トルーパー torūpā), or the Galaxy Force versions of Red Alert (ファストエイド First Aid) and his upgraded form "Cybertron Defense" Red Alert (ファストガンナー First Gunner, though an equally valid, and more meaningful, romanization would have been Fast Gunner).

Sometimes an official romanization may even be deliberately chosen to be distinct from the "obvious" one: The Japanese Robotmasters and Binaltech toys of the Generation 1 Mirage character, whose Japanese name (リジェ Rije) references the original toy's vehicle mode (a Ligier racing car), had their names officially romanized as "Rijie". Considering the severe difference to the spelling of the car manufacturer's name, this is commonly assumed to be a willful decision rather than a case of "Engrish".

And then there are the names that are so bizarre to begin with that any romanization would have to be either extremely liberal in order to make sense, or end up nonsensical either way. The most well-known examples are Deathsaurus (デスザラス Desuzarasu; an unreleased Hasbro Robot Heroes figure of the character would have been named "Dessaras") and "Latolata" (ラートラータ Rātorāta), although the Japanese names of Generation 1 Kup (チャー Chā, also "Cher", officially even rendered as "Chear" once) and Springer (スプラング Supurangu; either "Sprung" or "Sprang") and Vortex (ボルター Borutā, either "Vorter" or "Volter") are similarly wacky.

See Engrish for more.