Translating debadora to "device driver" is the only way to make it understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese.
Then again, translating いとこ to "cousin" is also the only way to make that understandable to someone who doesn't speak Japanese (and does speak English), but the goal is to transliterate it as "itoko", not to translate it as "cousin". Like it or not, the Japanese word is "debadora".
The example above of “sale” is a good one. In a Japanese shop for Japanese and by Japanese, you will see “sale” but you will never see se-ru.
> No, the Japanese word is デバドラ.
False; these are one and the same claim, not two conflicting claims.
> Once you translate or transliterate it, you’ve diverged from the original
Again, this is wrong. If your "transliteration" has diverged from the original, it's not a transliteration. A transliteration is a reflection of the original, just using a different orthographic system.
When an “alphabet” representation of a word is used in Japanese texts, the version of the word in either the original language or English is used.
e.g.
> タミル（Tamiḻ）という名称は、ドラミラ Dramiḻa（ドラヴィダ Dravida）の変化した形という説もある。[0]
The key factor you seem to be missing is that most of these words are themselves very lossy transliterations of original English words. Some become so ingrained in Japanese that they’re considered Japanese words by most people, and would make sense to leave in their lossy, katakana form even if romanized. As many people have mentioned here, “katsu” is ironically one of those words.
However, words like katsu are the exception and most are still considered English (or other language) words with the katakana being a best-effort representation in Japanese. The links shared by Zarel[0] and numpad0[1] demonstrate this perfectly.
The “original” word being expressed is “home” and “ホーム” is just the best you can do in an official Japanese script. “Ho-mu” isn’t useful for anyone, foreign or Japanese. It’s meaningless to non-Japanese speakers who aren’t familiar with the lossy transliteration to Japanese they need mentally reverse it. Japanese speakers could work it out quickly enough, but it would take more time and confusion since it’s neither representation they’re familiar with everyday, the original word “home” and the expected Japanese representation “ホーム.”
[0] https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/biggangan/ [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/タミル語
I don’t think it’s a settled question one way or the other, but is highly variable on context and history. For example, there have been several pushes, beginning with the Meiji to Revolution, to switch Japan to writing exclusively in romaji. If any had succeeded, we’d view this debate quite differently: