Transliteration is the act of moving a word from one writing system to another, and by its very nature it’s a difficult process since no two languages mesh up with each other perfectly. Having different approaches to the problem of how to write, say, a Chinese name in the Roman alphabet are why you may have grown up knowing the name Mao-Tse Tung then wondered why it’s suddenly changed to Mao Zedong, or why Peking is also known as Beijing, or why Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi supposedly has 37 (!) possible English spellings for his name. J-List sells the fun Queen’s Blade artbooks and figures, and when we first added the products to the site we had a problem: there was no “official” English spelling for the female character names. In order to decide which names to use as “canon,” we had to look at the source code to the official Japanese site and read the filenames the website used.
There was more to the great “Minmei or Minmay?” fan-wars of the 1980s than we knew at the time
