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@rahul.net wrote:
On Sun, 20 Jul 2008 WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Ignoring of course that other editors on this article, reading the same source, come to the opposite result as you. That is the entire basis of
the
problem. Which character is actually being shown.
Continuing to cast this as a "mistake" when it's a perception issue,
doesn't
make your argument stronger.
The first person who denied that it's a mistake used an *audio clip*, rather than reading anything. It's obviously a lot easier to mishear an audio clip than to misread printed material.
The second person who did so did so on the grounds that the first kanji is pronounced "Tetsu", rather than by reading the kana. It was rebutted by a later editor, who pointed out that kanji change their pronunciation in compounds.
The third one says he got it from the manga. Of course, the *English* manga has the mistake in it. He also claims the professional translators must be right, which isn't true. If he claims to have read any kana, I missed it.
There are no editors that looked at the kana and concluded that it's anything other than "Tessaiga".
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