Y'know, there's no shortage of Japanese-English translators in Wiki-land. Why not just, say, pick five at random and see if there's any disagreement regarding the pronunciation? "Reliable sources" are for _facts_. Translations are not "facts". "Ich bin ein Berliner" translates solely as "I am a Berliner". It requires reliable sources to determine whether that is generally parsed as "I am a person from Berlin" or "I am a jelly doughnut". The correct transliteration (not translation) of a Japanese word is a matter of recording in Romanji how the word is pronounced. However: has the incorrect transliteration become the English name? We'd need a reliable source asserting _that_. There's too small a base to claim "common usage", since that common usage comes from the fans who have read the mistranslated version. I think it's too soon in the life cycle of the English translation for Wikipedia to be perpetuating a recent transcription error (as opposed to, say, Gojira vs Godzilla). On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: -- --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆

Ken Arromdee arranged electrons to indicate (back on 07/21/2008 06:46 AM) that: I read Japanese well enough to transliterate hiragana, and those screenshots clearly show a "chisai tsu" less than half as tall as the "te" preceding it and the "sa" following. Accordingly, those five characters should be read as "te s sa i ga." Which doesn't mean the article should be moved! As someone else pointed out, our article on the big guy is at [[Godzilla]], not [[Gojira]]. Disclaimer: I know nothing whatsoever about anime of any sort, and I am nowhere near fluent in understanding Japanese (but I don't need to be to simply map one character set to another). -- Sean Barrett | The Bible has some pretty specific things to say sean(a)epoptic.com | about killing. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on | the subject of kneecaps. --Shepherd Derrial Book

I think there's a difference: Godzilla was intentionally changed. It's not the same as the original Japanese, but it's not a *mistake* either. It didn't arise because someone confused two similar-looking characters.

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Josh Gordon wrote: Um, the article says nothing about a dictionary in that context. Personally I'm skeptical that it's an error because at the time, Japanese material was routinely changed a lot when brought over, the names being the least part of it. But even then, there's another difference: the name is already in such wide use that Wikipedia isn't going to affect it much. Google shows that "Godzilla" has 11 times the hits of "Gojira". But Tetsusaiga gives me 112000 hits and Tessaiga gives me 83300; under these circumstances, Wikipedia is likely to *influence* adoption of the incorrect name. (Especially since there are fewer independent reference works dealing with Tessiaga than with Godzilla, so Wikipedia's influence is a much bigger piece of the pie.)