Forum - View topicTooru OKADA's name written incorrectly
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Grauw
Posts: 11 Location: Netherlands |
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Tooru OKADA (岡田徹)'s name in his entry on:
person#15380 is oncorrectly written as Toru OKADA, with only one o. Just look 徹 up in a Kanji dictionary, or try to type it in your IME, and you will see the kana (romanisation) should be とおる (tōru/tooru) and not とる (toru). ~Grauw |
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abunai
Old Regular
 Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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What you say is quite true, in so far as regular rules of transliteration/romanization go. However, when a person who appears in the Encyclopedia already has an "official" transliteration that deviates from the regular form, we tend to use that, instead.
In this case, Toru Okada's name appears on official sites in two different transliterations: "Okada Toru/Toru Okada" (most common) or "Okada Tohru/Tohru Okada" (infrequent). Obviously, the long form is the most correct one - but the short form is clearly the one in general use in Japan. As such, it is the one we use. BTW, I don't know whether you are aware of this, but it is possible to enter Encyclopedia data using names in kanji/kana. So, entering: Music: 岡田徹 is the same as entering: Music: Toru Okada (always assuming the person's name in kanji/kana is correctly listed in the database, of course) -abunai |
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chris keck
 Posts: 96 Location: Rhode Island, U.S. |
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Has this always been possible or is this a new feature? I ask because Dormcat posted some instructions on searching for and transliterating kanji names, but didn't mention just entering them directly. I never thought to try it since the search function doesn't work with kanji-at least it doesn't for me. animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10835 It saves a huge amoun of time and reduces the chance of errors if you can avoid having to search dictionarys and other websites to find the correct transliteration. chris keck |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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I was talking about new submissions, and it would not work on entries without an existing kanji name.
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chris keck
Posts: 96 Location: Rhode Island, U.S. |
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But you said in your submissons post,
If they are just new submissions how could it match "his / her previous [database] job..."? But really, the point of my question was; is this a new function (kanji matching) that has been added since dormcat's posting of submission instructions? Or, has this always been possible, just that no one bothered to tell anybody (including dormcat) about it? If the first is correct that's great. This will make it much easier to match staff names from Japanese sources and reduce the possibility of errors. If the second in true then keeping it a secret has caused myself, and I suspect many other contributors, to waste a lot of time trying to find the correct transliteration of staff names. chris keck |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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Those are two different issues. Allow me to reiterate. Since this database is Latin-based, every entry contains (is) romanization, but not every of them has kanji. Taking Grauw's case as an example: if there are two entries, Tooru OKADA and Toru OKADA, but neither has the kanji name (岡田 徹), then entering Music: 岡田徹 as abunai mentioned would have no effect and an error message would appear: No one has the name 岡田徹 in the database Furthermore, many romanization (especially staff names) were contributed according to US R1 DVD and/or fansubs, where they were often incorrectly transliterated. In many cases, those incorrect romaji were entered prior to the correct one and DO contain kanji in their respective entries. Then, users who prefer using kanji as the primary input method may not notice that the romaji is actually incorrect.
I wouldn't say it's a waste of time. First of all, this database is Latin-based, so every entry requires romanization. Second, even native Japanese speakers have difficult time romanizing complex kanji names (ever seen アニメスタッフの難読姓名 (hard-to-read names of anime staffs) on 2Ch?), such as Megumi KADONOSONO (門之園 恵美) Katsumi TAMEGAI (為我井 克美) Setsuko SHIBUICHI (四分一 節子) Finding out the correct transliteration is always useful. Third, although using kanji as the primary imput method would save a lot of effort (if they exist in target entries in the first place) to differentiate persons like younger and older Yuuki ITOU, this could increase the confusion for persons like Tomomi MOCHIZUKI (望月 智充), whose given name is listed as 智光 on quite a lot of Japanese websites. Entering "望月 智光" into ANN's database will result nothing. And I know you have Masatsugu ARAKAWA in your mind right now: even Production I.G's own official pages have two different versions of his given name (眞嗣 on Windy Tales and 真嗣 on Blood: The Last Vampire). Heck, as we speak, someone contributed Shinji ARAKAWA. Gotta straight things out.  (Principal Drawing?! Lousy R1 DVD translation of 'Key Animation (原画)'. Grrrrr.......)
In summary, I'd recommend users to find out the correct romaji before submission, even if the "kanji input" is available. It's fun to dig up information, isn't it? 
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chris keck
Posts: 96 Location: Rhode Island, U.S. |
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Dormcat, I wanted take a moment to follow up of the Arakawa Masatsugu/Shinji issue, although this really isn’t the right thread to do so. A while ago I had intended to post this information as a response to the previous Arakawa posts, but the thread was locked. Also, I was waiting to see what Tempest found out. He said he was going to contact someone at Production I.G. to ask about it. Anyway, it seems that the kanji in Mr. Arakawa’s given name was changed from 真嗣 to 眞嗣 sometime after he started receiving credits for his work in anime. Maybe he just likes the way 眞嗣 looks. Unfortunately for translators, all of the dictionaries and other Japanese name sources that I’ve found read 眞嗣 as Shinji. Other ANN encyclopedia contributors must have used similar sources since 荒川眞嗣 was in the encyclopedia already as Shinji Arakawa with several credits. Another contributor, jfrog I think, found an English source that listed Mr. Arakawa as Masatsugu and reported a duplicate person error. Dormcat tried to convince me that he thought that 真嗣 and 眞嗣 were interchangeable, but didn’t really say why. I went back to the dictionary (kanjidict) and found that both 真 and 眞 can be read as MASA and that 嗣 can be read as TSUGU. So, technically at least 真嗣 and 眞嗣 can be pronounced the same, even if 眞嗣 is not a generally recognized writing of Masatsugu. (It’s not that unusual really. In the US silly spellings are popular, especially for girl’s names. Like spelling Suzy as Suze.) After that I found sources that showed that all of the encyclopedia credits for Arakawa Shinji should be listed for Arakawa Masatsugu (in one case the same job in the same anime was credited to both of them) and submitted error reports to correct them. So, at that time there should have been nothing credited to Arakawa Shinji. It looks like some more encyclopedia contributors have made the same “error” since then. chris keck |
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