Quote:
Originally Posted by 玄武  Isn't it technically Gekkou? Don't wanna be an ass, just throwing it out there.
It's by Kanako Hoshino. Who is amazing, btw. |
The word 月光 when written in kana is げっこう. This can be romanized as "gekkou" if you want to make sure you capture the vowel extension at the end. There is a popular method of romanization where people drop many vowel extensions.
e.g.
Kouzou Nakamura -> Kozo Nakamura
Quote:
Originally Posted by aroomwithaview technically its 月光 and not gekkou or gekko or gekkoh or gecko or however the fuck people feel like romanizing a japanese word
theres no one single way to romanize japanese so arguing over it is pointless |
I agree that there isn't a romanization scheme that you can algorithmically follow to get a perfect result 100% of the time, but I do think there's a time and a place to use certain schemes.
Dropping vowel extensions makes sense in names very often. When you romanize a name, most of the time it's so someone can read it as a part of English or any other language that uses the roman alphabet. In this case, the priority is to not confuse the reader (who probably has little if any knowledge of Japanese). Removing most vowel extensions in this case makes sense. Kozo is much simpler for someone with no knowledge of Japanese to read properly than Kouzou.
In my opinion, when you cross over into the realm of romanizing Japanese words instead of translating their meaning, your audience is different than the one from above. You are now romanizing for an audience that has much more knowledge of Japanese (otherwise, why give them the Japanese word at all?). I think at this point it's important to capture all the elements that would be important in Japanese. This includes vowel extensions.
I don't think it's pointless to argue about it. The point of translation is to convey meanings in a format your audience can readily understand. The fact that genbu (or should I only use 玄武?) asked the question is an indicator that there's some confusion, and the fire isn't put out by taking the battery out of the smoke detector.
EDIT: Posts came in while I was writing my (admittedly long) post. When I started writing, aroomwithaview had the last post.
Japanese Song Translations 
