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Originally Posted by sitara
but why do they do that? it sounds so weird!!
so they would also turn an european name chinese, by trying to fnd kanji for it?
your own name should be internationally the same! XD
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What's the point...Why should Chinese try to find alternate characters that "sound" like 'Hamasaki Ayumi', when 濱崎步 is her written name..? If they did that for all Japanese and Korean stars, the stars would have to sign their name differently in Chinese speaking countries than if they used the original Chinese characters which are their name.... And imagine how many words would be needed just to make up "Ha ma sa ki A yu mi". What a long name......
For non-Japanese and Koreans though, they find characters that sound like the person's name. For ex., Barack Obama, they don't translate his first name (I don't think?), but his last name is 'phonetically' translated as 奧巴馬, which is.. sort of like "ao ba ma"
Even if they did translate her first name to phonetics, it would probably end up being something like 愛玉米 which is like..Ai yu mi (Love corn) but not... (Maybe not...since people who read the newspapers would be confused...'what's this about loving corn and holding a concert..??') and what if they choose words that don't exist in Japanese...then the celebrity would have problems..or what if they choose something but it means something else in Japanese...etc.
And, with the different dialects, they would probably have to use one writing in Taiwan/Mainland, and another in HK or something. How inconvenient...
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For the GUILTY album, they held a contest before it came out for people to make a translation for the name of the album and they would get...something free. I'm actually not sure if they do the translations in China, since China is bad at translations. China and Taiwan have different translations anyways.
Majority of the Singles are direct translations. The albums are always interesting though
