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Vaturna's Blog

August 20th, 2023
Many international anime, manga and webnovel communities use romaji titles for Japanese content. (Japanese transformed from 仮名と漢字 into roman script to be easy to pronounce/write by foreigners)
I started learning Japanese in 2022, but my feelings about this topic are still the same today as when I started watching anime many years ago. Not properly translating titles is a bad practice. English titles (alternatively the language the content is translated to) are much better.

I always work with localized names (or the actual Japanese names, not the romaji versions) because they're the ones used by my streaming platforms, disc releases, merchandise, news sites and in most of my friend groups.

This is just my personal opinion. I'm a casual anime enjoyer with no connections to fan translation communities at all. Nobody should need my approvement to use whatever names they like.


Titles don't have any meaning if you don't know what they say.
Titles have a function. They are supposed to give an impression about the content, so that people know what to expect and can decide if it's worth picking up.
The problem with romaji Japanese titles for a non-Japanese audience is that people don't understand them. Even if you like Japanese sounding names, romaji titles are just gibberish. They don't tell you anything about the anime/manga/etc. They're also much harder to memorize compared to titles in your own language, because your mind can't make any connections between the words.

Romaji only makes me think of fan translations
When I look back, titles like "Shingeki no Kyojin" or "Toaru Kagaku no Railgun" were always from some shady sites where you wondered how long these sources would be available before they were shut down because of copyright infringement. Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't get why fan communities glorify Japanese titles so much. Is it because people can't agree on a single translation, so they have to use the lowest common denominator? Why not use official translation where it's available? Are the Japanese fan translators the issue, because they're already too attached to the original names?
I hate it when some romaji names become part of the official translations because they've already been popular in fan communities before they were published internationally (for example "Mushoku Tensei" or "Oshi no Ko"), getting Japanese abbreviations (like "Konosuba" or "Bofuri") is already bad enough.

Romaji is ugly Japanese
This is just personal preference, but I don't like to read romaji. I know a little bit of Japanese and I roughly understand over 1000 kanji, but I often struggle understanding romaji because it removes to much structure from a sentence.
Please, either use real Japanese or use English (or any other language).

MAL claims to be the world's largest anime and manga database and community created by an anime fan, for anime fans
In the age of simultcasts we often get official translations right along with the original ones and many fans only get exposed to English titles thanks to Crunchyroll and other international publishers.
It makes sense for a database like MAL to still use consistent titles for identification, and romaji is definitely a good solution for this, but why do we need to actually keep using these technical titles when MAL is even embedding Crunchyroll for new releases which instead uses translated ones? Why can't we still not use officially translated titles where it's available across most of the site?
Right now, romaji titles are the standard on MAL. You can change the language for the anime and manga lists, but for the majority of the site the switch is not supported. In theory, having multiple "official" titles could make communication on the forum more difficult, but I don't think it would change much because people are already using both the romaji and English names and understand each other.
Posted by Vaturna | Aug 20, 2023 10:40 AM | 0 comments
It’s time to ditch the text file.
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