10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki | Hacker News Reader

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki

www3.nhk.or.jp

1 pointUltramanoid7 comments

... Or Miyazaki Hayao ( 宮崎駿 ) as we would say over here, and the government wants foreign media to start saying as well.

An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at legendary Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki. For a decade, he allowed a single documentary filmmaker to shadow him.

If word order is to be unchanged now, let's start doing that with the rest of the words, eh? Sentences can be translated word-for-word without regard for the sentence ordering conventions... or maybe this isn't such a good idea.

Recent discussion :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970922

Personally I don't see a reason not to do it, as it is done for Chinese and Korean names. Japanese name order in foreign media is the outlier.

Nobody in Western media writes or says Jinping Xi.

Those aren't universal rules. I knew a man by the name of Moon Kim, originally from Korea but then a US citizen.

We change name order for the same reason that we change the order of anything else in a sentence. Partial translation creates confusion.

Doing it for some languages and not others is inconsistent and certainly confusing as well, if said languages share the same cultural conventions when it comes to people's names, as it is the case here.

Again, having the Japanese following Western rules instead of their own as an exception compared to Chinese, Korean, etc, makes no sense. If we're arguing for adapting to Western order, then do it for the Chinese and others too.

What I'm saying is that yes, we do switch name order for Korean. Maybe I met a weirdo, but he was from Korea and he did put his given name before his family name ("Moon" can be either) when living in the USA.

Of course. And so do Japanese living in the U.S., Germany or South Africa. Or Taiwanese in Spain or Canada. They live in another country, under its laws.

No Japanese in Japan, or Korean in Korea, or Chinese in China, or Taiwanese in Taiwan does put family name second. Nor the foreign media when speaking of them, be they leaders, politicians, artists, or plain citizens that make the news. And no media in the world refers to Xi Jinping as Jinping Xi. Or to Tsai Ingwen as Ingwen Tsai, Moon Jaein as Jaein Moon, etc.

Yet they will say Shinzo Abe instead of Abe Shinzo. Why this extraordinary exception ? Does not make much sense, if any. Translate all names or translate none.

Edit : Fun fact; if a foreign born person becomes a naturalized Japanese, they will have to adopt a Japanese name ( could be simply some sort of transliteration of their original name ) and it will be always legally displayed in Japanese order, family name first.

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