Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-2215783-20130424072418

One of the things a lot of sites that work with Japanese products have to deal with is Japanese names. The big question is do we translate or leave the name as is? Both decisions have their own merits and demerits, but I think we have to translate the names of games fully into English.

For hardcore geeks like us, we see a name like Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu, and we know exactly what it is referring to. For someone who is new to the series, that name is meaningless and creates unnecessary confusion. A useful name for people would be Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. For the average English speaker, the name describes the product and is easy to comprehend.

Other games suffer from things like half translated titles, like Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Kōkeisha. Why is Club translated, but the rest of the name is left in Japanese? A useful name would be Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir. I admit that using Famicom is kind of a cheat, but the name is so integrated into Nintendo culture, I think it's an acceptable term.

Now, of course I'm not saying that absolutely everything must be translated in English. For a character like Ayumi Tachibana, being a Japanese woman living in Japan, a reasonable person would expect her to have a Japanese name.

With that said, anything translated should be a reasonable translation that matches the intent of the original title. Nazo no Murasame-jō means Murasame's Mysterious Castle or The Mysterious Murasame Castle. Either one works, and is respectful to the developers, and gives people a clear understanding of the game. A title like Murasame's Awesome House of Riddles is not respectful to developers intent, and should not be used.

I believe that using reasonably translated names that the average reader can understand is important for making the Wiki accessible to more people.  