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Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#251

Post by panglott »

jasonjei wrote: post #55
Causality1 wrote: post #17

Personally I think this is a matter of translation. In English the personal name comes first followed by the surname. In Japanese honorifics come after the name but it would be quite silly to ask foreign media to call Abe Shinzo "Abe Shinzo Mr." instead of "Mr. Abe Shinzo" or for an American to ask British media to not refer to American mothers as "mum". Sometimes localizing a name means altering it.

I don’t think it’s just a matter of translation preference. I think it’s also to be respectful to the people whose names are being mentioned. When Chinese or Japanese concert Roman names to Hanzi/Kana, they try to observe the FIRSTNAME LASTNAME convention if preferred by that culture. Such as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ (Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs)

This is framed as "respectful", but it's another way to mark the person as an outsider.

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#252

Post by [deleted] »

ahartmetz wrote: post #229
hiroshi3110 wrote: post #223

As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule. e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei. It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.

So that might be why Beijing is called Peking in German... Although the (generally closer to original pronunciation) English romanizations of some Chinese names are becoming more common.

[deleted]

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#253

Post by 7FE1CCE3 »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #234
ahartmetz wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that might be why Beijing is called Peking in German... Although the (generally closer to original pronunciation) English romanizations of some Chinese names are becoming more common.

It's called ~"Peking" in most European languages.

Most of Europe probably got it from France, who used the Cantonese pronunciation: bāk-gīng

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#254

Post by 7FE1CCE3 »

apexalpha wrote: post #239
hiroshi3110 wrote: post #223

As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule. e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei. It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.

Dutch here, due to historical trade relations we also still use Peking!

That's how they pronounced the name of the city in southern China, which is where the trade started.

http://cantonese.org/search.php?q=北京

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#255

Post by 7DA70964 »

mshockwave wrote: post #176

i understand using family name first for leader/president or public press, but iirc most of the asian country still using given name before family name in their passports

Passports have completely separate fields for "surname" and "given names". And the machine-readable representation at the bottom is always SURNAME<GIVEN< even for countries that have the opposite convention.

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#256

Post by ylyn »

GordonS wrote: post #36
ylyn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does happen in Singapore.

Is this common? We used to have an office in SG, and I don't recall ever seeing it.

Mainly in the civil service, I guess.

https://www.gov.sg/sgdi/ministries/pmo

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#257

Post by thepra »

Best thing would do is to have a single field for name and surname and other legal variations. Like many pointed out the cultural differences are way too many to pull up with more than one field and manage them all algorithmically. That's a recipe for disaster when the culture changes the way they use the identity.

I'm a developer and I'm not gonna fall for that.

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#258

Post by yellowapple »

yoz-y wrote: post #227
yellowapple wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sticking to a consistent ordering of given and (middle and) (paternal and) (maternal and) family names would also remove ambiguity.

It would but then a good part of the world would have to change their convention. I don’t think they see any good reason to adopt our conventions.

It could be per-language, i.e. use family-given when speaking Japanese or given-family when speaking English. That's more what I'm getting at.

This would also (I'd propose) hold true for non-Japanese names; if family-given is conventional when speaking Japanese, and my English name is John Johnson, it'd only be fair for my Japanese name to be ordered as Johnson John.

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#259

Post by lmm »

RandallBrown wrote: post #249
zapzupnz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It's really quite simple; we should call people as they call themselves, not how we think they should be called. It's the basic respect we expect for ourselves but the West is bizarrely inclined not to give to others. We come up with all sorts of systems, checks, and balances to decide what the order should be rather than just use the order that it is already in.

The difficulty with that is that when writing a news article you can't always ask the person how they would prefer their name written.

Why would you need to? You must've gotten the name from some source, just write it in the same order it is there - transliterating into a different writing system if necessary, but there's just no need to ever mess with the order.

Re: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

#260

Post by rswail »

hiroshi3110 wrote: post #223

As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule. e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei. It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.

The capital city of China is called "Beijing" in Mandarin and "Pekin" in Cantonese (as I understand it).

The Western world's engagement with China was via Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Cantonese is the dialect.

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