Why do people reverse Japanese names?

It doesn't make much sense in the abstract, but it's a standard convention used by major English-language media outlets, including Wikipedia, and people should follow it instead of being weeaboos.

FTR, using "Weeaboo" in a non-ironic context causes you to automatically lose the argument at hand.

Also, I feel that some people have taken the idea that they must, at all costs avoid being "weeaboo" to utterly ridiculous levels.

I honestly don't care, as long as they don't display the given name when only the surname is said or vice-versa, and I can tell which name is which.

As I've heard from many places, translating Japanese is 90% art, 10% accuracy (or something like that). Taking liberties like that won't hurt anyone, some people who are used to other translations of something will just find it mildly irritating.

No you don't

Because we can?

I can't believe this went on for 3 pages of disagreements.

As a general rule..........

Fansubs: Make the subtitles fit what they're saying. Easy as that.

Manga/Novels: If the character is eastern(or fantasy counterpart), use "Family Name - Given Name", order, for example, Touhara Naoya, instead of Naoya Touhara.. If the character is western(or fantasy counterpart), use "Given Name - Family Name" order, for example, Astarotte Ygvar.

The naming order of these are from the same series. Simple and easy.

Want another example? Hiiraga Saito is japanese while Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière is erm.....french? Either way, definately western. Both from the same series.

Simple and easy.

edited 25th Jul '11 5:42:53 PM by Signed

The reason Japanese names get reversed and other East Asian nations don't, as far as I can tell, is that the Japanese do so themselves. I've noticed that something like 99.99% of the time a Japanese name is spelt out in Romanji/English in anime it is in Western name order. Moreover, outside of anime fandom the use of Western name order appears to be ubiquitous for referring to Japanese names. People like Shigeru Miyamoto and Ichiro Suzuki have always been had their names written/spoken with Western name order standard, as opposed to Chinese celebrities like Yao Ming who are always referred to surname-first.

I have no idea why the Japanese alone do this, but I'm not pretentious enough to go tell them they're writing their own names incorrectly, unlike some of the more overzealous anime fans out there.

This sums it up pretty well.

Western characters already use western-ordered names in the original japanese text anyways, just as in real life, countries with eastern-order naming always keep the western order of foreign names.

IIRC, both of the examples you said were already used that way in the original work. If, in some other case, they would still choose to break the traditions, and use the eastern naming order for characters that seem to be western, they did it intentionally, with a good reason, and it is a part of the style. "Fixing" these would be like translating rice balls as sandwitches, just because the setting isn't Japanese anyways.

Actually, I'd say that it's more along the lines of translating honorifics: taking a grammatical feature of the language and adjusting it so people not familiar with that culture can understand it better. Because, bear in mind, there are a lot of people who don't know that Japnese people list their surnames first, so translations either need to reverse the order or explain the naming convention (unless they're something like FLCL that revel in being exotic and not that easy to understand).