Misused: Spell My Name With An S

If there's no official spelling(s), then you don't list them on the Spell My Name With An S page because they cannot qualify as examples.

@24: Must be talking about Japanese works with no romanizations or overseas versions at all? (That'd be pretty rare nowadays, but in older works this appeared quite a few times especially in Japan-only work)

Like said, if there's no romanizations at all, it shouldn't count, no matter how much dispute fans have over trying to romanize it.

Even with a cleanup it isn't going to stop getting used that way, many many people can't tell the difference and treat fan translations, literal spellings on The Other Wiki and the like as official names and will just keep adding wicks simply because it exists on the internet it must be right.

We do not put names without official spellings only in their original Kanji as well so we are just as bad.

edited 11th Feb '17 10:12:57 PM by Memers

cleanup are partly to enforce the new rules. People should know better.

I'm alluding to unlocalized Japanese works where romanizations only exist in side materials of somewhat dubious canonicity.

IMO, no unofficial examples should count, period. I don't care if that's Japanese, Russian, French, Cantonese, Farsi, Sioux, or English.

That doesn't really work for those works that say do not have official english versions, period, unless we should start writing everything in Kanji because Spell My Name With An S will come up here on how to spell things.

If they don't have official translations then they don't get to list examples. We already discussed this.

Can we finalize the decision? We got a bunch of "yea" votes to limit it to official spellings with only a couple "nay" votes, and this thread has been open for a month.

You're being extremely English-centric. No; I don't care if the example is Greek to Cyrillic, Hanja to Navaho, or British Sign Language to Abjad.

If you look at the page image, this isn't even a translation trope! This exists whenever the work presents two or more spellings for a name/word. Fans saying they know better than the people paid to publish the work can go fuck off until they actually get paid to translate the work by people the Creator trusts.

Kanji examples should absolutely be present on the page, if there are two different Kanji for the name/word in official material. Heck, that's probably common enough to get a subpage. But letting people piss about professionals disagreeing with fan opinions is permission to act childishly. Treat the publishers with professional respect, damn it!

This trope is something that can be deliberate or a mistake, but someone misspelling the name of J. K. Rowling in their fanfic is not an example of her publishers misspelling her name.

Was that to me or Memers?

edited 12th Mar '17 8:40:46 PM by Karxrida

Regarding the comment about English-centrism I think the reason is most of the readers and editors are English-speakers. There is nothing wrong with that by itself, but how it relates to this discussion is that means people have to translate Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Greek and Cryllic names into the Latin Alphabet so that people can read the names when the work is too recent for a localization or official subtitles, or when No Export for You prevents an official translation. (of course other Latin languages also seem to be rare among examples of this trope), and that it also means people would be quick to use unofficial translations as the names on the articles for familiarity's sake.

I think that the answer would be simply to forbid examples of the trope from counting unofficial sources, be it Fan Translations/fandom, wikipedia pages and even This Very Wiki itself, while having a thread set up for checking and vetting examples from untranslated works (and works translated into non-Latin alphabets) that do misspell names. If a work has an unofficial translation and consistency spells all its names, it should be disqualified. If a work has a several Same Language Dubs and they spell the name differently, or if the name was misspelled in the work, then it should count. (and it should also include the misspelled/differing names and the more common spellings within the work as written, no translations unless it changes the pronunciation)

edited 12th Mar '17 10:12:33 PM by MorningStar1337

Two clarifications may be necessary:

• Any translated spelling originating from the work's rightsholder is "official" by definition, even if not used in the eventual translated release of the work.
• If a work references the trope, it can be listed as an in-universe example, even if no character's name has multiple official spellings.

Bump.

Can we call this on general thread consensus (which is "restrict to official translations" last I checked) or should a crowner be made?

This is good to call for me.

Went back and counted the votes. There are 8 for "limit to official translations" and 2 for "keep as-is". While the voter pool is small, a 4:1 ratio is good enough to call it a consensus with a supermajority.

Though maybe having ~Madrugada double check the votes would be helpful since I only did a quick skim. I know she's done that in the CM thread.

• OP by Ookimun: Limit it to official spellings.
• Getta Limit it to official spellings.
• Darkchiefy Limit it to official spellings.
• Karxrida Limit it to official spellings
• Memers Leave it as is
• Everlasting Limit it to official spellings.
• Madrugada Limit it to official spellings
• Xtifr Limit it to official spellings
• Zyffyr Limit it to official spellings
• Crazy Samritan Limit it to official spelling (noting that this would apply to all non-Roman-alphabet works.
• Morning Stars's in a complex answer but it boils down to "Limit it to official spellings".

• Lu says "limit it but there's room for some fan spellings in certain circumstances. Waffle.
• Septimus posted several times, but never clearly says Yes or No; his suggestion that Fan Spellings be spun off into its own page suggests that he is supporting making this one official only. That's a Waffle for the purpose of this count.
• Prfnoff questions what is dne with works thathave no ifficial romanization, but never votes either way.
• Errock say he's satisfied to call it, but also never clearly votes.
  • 10 Limit it.
  • 1 Leave it as is,
  • 2 Waffle
  • no with no clear vote.

Final ratio, throwing out the Waffles and non-votes, is 10:1 in favor of limiting it to official spellings. Well above the 2:1 threshold for declaring a consensus.

edited 3rd Aug '17 6:15:23 PM by Madrugada

Has anyone actually gone through the examples themselves on this on the context of the examples? And looked at how many unofficial spellings we use on the wiki?

Because it is actually quite a bit more than anyone would expect as a lot of works on this wiki do not have official English releases. There are hundreds of series on the wiki without English versions that use one of many spellings for names and titles. We use unofficial Spell My Name With An S a ton and without the wick on pages explaining our usage and the other possible variations it is a disaster waiting to happen.

We on the wiki will settle for one spelling and will correct others.

Fans of things can go decades calling something X and then comes an English version which changes everything, how would that not count?

edited 4th Aug '17 1:16:03 AM by Memers

I don't think this should be a trope about speculations or assumptions. If it's that, it should be marked as YMMV, because then it's an Audience Reaction. But as long as it isn't, it should only be about official spellings.

If it's being used on sites, fan or news, it isn't speculation though.

Both interpretations are probably trope-worthy, but "official only" should probably be the one who gets the page, due to the Trope Namer being a Real Life person. The real question is what the exact guidelines should be. Here's my shot, referring to specifically translations from Japanese:

• If official translated material (in the same language) uses two different translations/spellings, it's Spell My Name With An S.
  • Example: Final Fantasy VII's Aeris (from FFVII proper)/Aerith (from Kingdom Hearts, the Compilation, and presumably the remake).
  • Example: Many character and location names are different between the American and European English versions of the Fire Emblem games.

• If the name was romanized in a non-conventional manner (and it wasn't a "Blind Idiot" Translation,) it's the other trope.
  • Example: Zakkusu to Zack and Rufausu to Rufus, both from Final Fantasy VII.

• If the name was translated to two different things in two different languages, it's not either of these tropes. It might still qualify for another translation trope, e.g. Clean Dub Name.
  • Example: Final Fantasy VIII's Saifa became Seifer in English and Cifer in German.
  • Example: Zelda's alter ego from Ocarina of Time, Sheik, is Shiek in some languages to preserve the pronunciation.

• If the name is romanized one way in the original language and a different way in English, it's not either of these tropes.
  • Example: The main villain of Final Fantasy VI (Kefuka by Hepburn romanization) is Cefca in Japan and Kefka overseas.

• If fans claim a name was mistranslated and continue to use their version of it, it's not either of these tropes.

I'm going to go with an official source to prove my point. Digimon has a monster named ロードナイトモン, or "Rhodoknightmon". Or is it "Lordknightmon"? The correct answer, is both, because they're both pronounced and spelled the same way in Japanese, despite having two entirely different English meanings. This was entirely on purpose.

Now, Digimon has a strong(ish) English following but several monsters are in material that never gets a proper translation. Lordknight/Rhodoknight is, which leads to the "official" answer being one of those, completely different names like "Crusader" and of course, Engrish(Load Knight), but there are several others never officially romanticized that English audiences nonetheless know the existences of. And their differences in spelling are often equally valid from a translation standpoint.

In fact, the fan version should be relatively easier to sort out. There's very little clock on fandom, so wrong examples can be weeded out, regardless of how many people like them. If it's not a valid translation, we need not list it. Official sources are often rushing for the holiday break, and have little incentive to go back and change things they get wrong, as they have been paid already and have to get to other projects to keep getting paid, hence embarrassing cases like "Loadknightmon" stick. To say otherwise would be to admit ignorance and or apathy at how these things, societies who don't default to the Latin Alphabet and fandoms of their works, function. English speakers didn't always use the Latin Alphabet and have had plenty of our own cases of this.

edited 4th Aug '17 7:19:47 AM by IndirectActiveTransport

What exactly is the point you are trying to make? Is it that translations screw things up occasionally? We already have a trope for that. Weird translations aren't Spell My Name With An S, they're another potential trope.

I disagree with your criteria, RallyBot2. You're calling names "translations" when they're merely transliterations.

The point I'm trying to make, Rallyboy, is that not accepting "Spell my name with an S" examples because they are not official is wrong on many levels. The fact is, names can be converted to Latin letters many different ways. Official examples are more problematic than fan ones because in the fan cases, you don't have to list cases that are simply transliterated wrongly.

The point I was making with Digimon is that just because something never gets an official transliteration doesn't mean fans using the Latin alphabet won't come across it, legitimately at that. Transformers at one point had the page quote, you know, WORSTCOUNTRYEVER Transformers. Because since when have they let some terrible adaptations or the fact the merchandise is in a language they need a dictionary for stop them from buying toys?