Transliteration is the act of transcribing words from one writing system to another, and it’s an inherently imprecise process because languages seldom have the courtesy to match up perfectly. This is why the old rulers of Russia can be either tsars or czars, why Mao Tse-Tung suddenly changed to Mao Zedong while I was in school and why lovely Korean figure skater Kim Yuna’s name is translated as “Yona” here in Japan. When Madoka Magica came along, fans wondered how to spell the name of everyone’s least favorite Incubator. Was it Kyubey, which has good balance, or possibly Kyubeh, which creates a pronunciation that’s closer to the Japanese version, or Kyuubey, to represent the long first vowel? Or perhaps QB for brevity’s sake, or Qbey, which appears once in the show? The translation and editing of Steins;Gate was a very meticulous process since we knew we need to get everything right, and occasionally we had questions of spelling crop up. Should the heir of the Yanabayashi Shrine be translated as Ruka or Luka? And what about the famous phrase Okarin is always uttering? In every case we went to Nitroplus and got an official spelling to use, to make sure the game matched the intentions of the writer 100%.
Mao Asada and “Kim Yona” (in Japan at least)
