romanization of Japanese words! (ayu titles!)

[J0nB0yH88]

Hey all!

Just looking over some of my iTunes, I couldn't help but notice many of my J-POP songs don't seem to be translated right?

For example ayu's interlude 'Load of the SHUGYO', 'Shugyo' should be written 'Shugyō' should it not? meaning 'training'. My Chinese friend once told me that using these little accents makes the word translate totally differently, and I know that in this case the macron (line above the O) is used to make it a long vowel sound.

The same example can be found for the (lovely) singer Yuna Ito, whose name literally translates as Itō Yuna, should we not be using the macron in her name?

Do Japanese not use these macrons and accents for their translations?

If anyone can shed any light on this situation I'd much appreciate it! I'm very interested in foreign language!

Thankya!

[labello]

Concerning Ayu's song title, she named it that way so I wouldn't change it just so it is romanized perfectly. But that's just what I think. She also named her song now&4eva but shouldn't it be now&forever in proper English? I just think it's kind of her artistic freedom in the case of song titles
I don't know about the artist names though, sorry!

[Delirium-Zer0]

Romanization from Japanese to English does have some standard systems, but it isn't itself "standardized" entirely, and as such there are going to be discrepancies.

Most romanization is based on the Hepburn system and its many variants, which does use "ō" to denote the "おう" sound (except if there is a word border between them, or if it's being used for the "ou" form of a verb).

Japan also has it's own "Nippon-shiki" romanization style which is mostly pretty archaic at this point but I still come across it. It's based more on telling you what characters were used in the original Japanese, not how they actually sound, so as a result many automated kana-to-romaji systems use it. It also uses a circumflex instead of a macron like the Hepburn system in order to indicate long vowels. In Nippon-shiki, しゅぎょう would be romanized as "syugyô."

The Passport Standard of romanization, is permissive for the sake of names. So the names Itō, Itou, Ito, and Itoh could all be the same name, just romanized differently. Admittedly, this does result in some confusion (大野 means "big field" and　小野 means "little field," so they're complete opposites, but with passport romanization they could both be spelled "Ono"), but with personal names it doesn't matter as much.

When it comes to artist names (and other proper nouns like song titles), what system is used amounts to little more than a stylistic or marketing choice. Sometimes a name just looks cooler with two i's instead of one, or with an h instead of a u, or whatever. In English, the length of a sound isn't a phoneme that makes a difference in meaning, so in order to further "anglicize" words, Japanese writers and artists and professionals will often omit sound lengthening notation entirely, rather than choosing between one.

Take 椎名林檎　for instance, whose name has been romanized at least 3 different ways in an official capacity: Ringo Sheena, Shéna Ringö, her website currently spells it as Shiina Ringo, etc. In her case, those first two aren't real "romanizations" so much as they're deliberately written to say "I'm a rock musician" ("Sheena" is probably a reference to the song "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" by The Ramones, a reference invoked by late 70s female-fronted japanese rock band Sheena & the Rokkets; the umlaut over the o in Shéna Ringö is just a really common metal trope). Again, style over "proper" romaji. It's not just her either... for example, B'z lead vocalist 稲葉浩志 was once constantly credited as "Kohshi Inaba" but is now "Koshi Inaba" despite the official romaji of his name being "Inaba Kōshi."

So yeah I guess Ayu just stylistically decided the song should be called "Load of the SHUGYO" rather than "Load of the SHUGYOU" or "SHUGYOH" or anything... just... because! lol