Thoughts on Japanese names

[Tom Gally]

(Cross-posted to the Honyaku and SWET lists)

I’m now translating a statement that will be issued in Japanese and English jointly by ten Japanese university presidents. The first page of the statement in Japanese has the names, titles, and affiliations of all of the presidents. To confirm the readings and spellings of the names, I checked the “Message from the President” (or something similar) page on each university’s English website. The names (after anonymization) were listed on those ten pages as follows:

Michiko MATSUMOTO
SUZUKI Hiroshi
Kato Yoko
Kohei Satoh
Kazuko Kanazaki, KANEZAKI-Kazuko
YAMAMOTO NOBUO
Masao Tanaka
HASHIMOTO Fumiko
WATANABE Shigeru
Eiji Kobayashi

In other words, there was no consistency in terms of order of given name and surname, capitalization, or representation of long vowels.

What should the translator do in a case like this? Since the names appear one after another on a list, the above inconsistency would be jarring. If the people were all just regular folks with no international presence, I would choose one format—probably given-name–surname with only the first letters capitalized, and no macrons or post-o h's—and apply it in all cases. But these people are university presidents and many of them have publications in English, so it makes sense to follow their individual preferences.

However, having worked in Japanese academia for many years, I also know that a person’s individual preference is often not followed even by people within the same university. I tried hard to get my preferred renderings of my name (“Tom Gally” or トム・ガリー) used in all official documents and webpages but failed. Even the “Messages from the President” might not reflect each president’s individual preference. And the “Kazuko Kanazaki, KANEZAKI-Kazuko” probably represents nobody’s preference, as that university’s English website seems to have been machine-translated.

So I gave the person who is coordinating the release of this statement one example of consistent formatting, and I suggested that someone other than me make the final decision about what to do. I suspect that she will ask her contact person at each university and try to get some kind of consensus from them.

One reason I wrote about this is that it was interesting to see that, despite Japanese government attempts to promote one way of writing Japanese names in English, actual usage among prominent Japanese who know English still varies widely.

Another is that this strikes me as the type of problem that AI might not be good at resolving. Always curious about what our AI puppet masters have to say, I asked four of them about this issue. Their responses:

https://gally.net/temp/20240227japanesenames.html

Tom Gally

[John Stroman]

Tom,

In the citation sections of patent applications I frequently encounter the formatting of "MATSUMOTO, Michiko" as an author in scientific publications. Although different scientific publications seem to have different rules for capitalization in their reference sections, the family names are consistently listed first in alphabetical order. 

Regardless of which order you choose, however, the all-caps usage effectively seems to clarify which is the family name and which is the given name. 

Since the document you are preparing will be published in English, I think your first listing of "Michiko MATSUMOTO" will eventually become the default for general publications, but that's pure speculation on my part.

John Stroman

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[Fred Uleman]

The other question, of course, is whether you alphabetize them or not --- the "not" possibly in deference to some traditional ranking of their universities' importance.

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Fred Uleman, translator emeritus

[JimBreen]

> I would choose one format—probably given-name–surname with only the first letters capitalized, and no macrons or post-o h's—and apply it in all cases.

I would do that too.  It's a document in English and that's the usual way it's done in English. Not sure about the Satoh/Sato case; if 佐藤さん wants it romanized as Satoh, I'd go along with it.

[An anecdote I tell about Japanese name order relates to the days when I was living in Tokyo and had to visit my bank occasionally for more complex transactions. I'd fill in the form with my surname and given names in the appropriate places. A couple of times a "Mr William" was called to the counter. Obviously the 銀行員 had assumed  that for a gaijin, the names would be reversed (my middle name is William).]

Cheers

Jim