Romanization
Romanization refers to the the the adaption of non-Romance language to the 26-character Roman 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.
In fandom the term romanization is frequently (incorrectly) used to refer to Japanese misspelling of English words.
Japanese and English
Any phonetic alphabet is (at best) an approximation of the sounds it represents. The Japanese alphabet distinguishes between fewer 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 combinations of the mouth-movements for "c" and "h," but a close cousin,) but even those combinations are imperfect; in double-o represents different sounds in 'cook' and 'spook.'
Notably the Japanese alphabet 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 they frequently acquire creative spellings as a result of being rendered 'down' into the Japanese alphabet then re-romanized, in such situations Engrish is a perfectly logical rendering.
In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country.
- For further information, see: Wikipedia:Romanization of Japanese
Notorious/Hilarious Romanizations in Transformers
Romanization confusion can either be;
- Improper Japanese rendering of English names
- Words whose English spelling is open to interpretation.
- Minelba — Minerva