Romanization

Minerva; hypercorrecting "r" into "l", while somehow retaining the "b" from Japanese phonemes. Oh, Takara.

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" phoneme 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 syllabary 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 * 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 upbringing, 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 result in a phenomenon called "[[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Engrish|{{#if:||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

Notorious and hilarious Romanizations in Transformers

Romanization confusion can either be;

1. Improper Japanese rendering of English names
2. Words whose English spelling is open to interpretation.

• Minelba—Minerva
• Butt—Blot
• Clerken—Kraken
• "Comvoy", used on the packaging for Transformers: Mystery of Convoy
• Variations of "Destron", including "Deathtron" and "Destoron"
• Deszaras
• Rartorata
• Transformers Collection Chear
• A questionable case would be the various Japanese Mirage toys named "Rijie" (Robotmasters, 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.