I know there isn't a particularly distinct difference between L and R in native Japanese, but very often proper nouns and other non-translated Japanese names/words work their way into English translations. An odd thing I've noticed is that often when media is re-retranslated, Ls and Rs get flipped in proper nouns.
I've noticed this a lot in Final Fantasy games in particular (Rally-ho turned into Lali-ho), and generally the later translations had better English. However I haven't really noticed more Ls turning into Rs or vice versa; I haven't seen any particular pattern to the changes at all, so I'm wondering what (if any) logic is behind it.
Is there a "proper" way of determining whether a sound should be transliterated as an L or an R or are L and R picked simply based on which "sounds better" to whoever is doing the transliterating?
No comments:
Post a Comment