Egg Man or Robotnik?

[MrAfterFx]

I grew up with knowing him as eggman but I dont care what people call him .

[Croooow!]

It's fine to translate stuff into English so we can understand it, but I hate to see character names translated or changed. My name is Inazuma. Yeah, it means lightning in English, but you would still call me Inazuma because you shouldn't translate names.

The main character in the Pocket Monster anime is Satoshi, not Ash. That is not how you properly translate something.

The real fact is that a translator's job is to translate, and changing random character names is not translating.

So should have all of the Pokemon kept their original Japanese names?

[YoshiEgg25]

It's fine to translate stuff into English so we can understand it, but I hate to see character names translated or changed. My name is Inazuma. Yeah, it means lightning in English, but you would still call me Inazuma because you shouldn't translate names.

The main character in the Pocket Monster anime is Satoshi, not Ash. That is not how you properly translate something.

The real fact is that a translator's job is to translate, and changing random character names is not translating.

So should have all of the Pokemon kept their original Japanese names?

Knowing a few of the Japanese names, I'm going to say HELL NO. I'm not calling my Drowzee and Hypno "Sleep" and "Sleeper".

Although some of the English names suck themselves.

[flamepanther]

Heck, for Blaster Master, they didn't just adopt the wacky American localization storyline. Apparently they latest game is based upon the story established in the Worlds of Power novelization of Blaster Master.

Blaster Master Overdrive? I haven't completed it yet, so maybe there's some big reveal I'm missing, but it doesn't appear to have anything in common with the Worlds of Power book by "FX-9". I remember reading that as a kid, oddly enough.

So should have all of the Pokemon kept their original Japanese names?

That's up to Nintendo, but I'd say it sure worked out fine for Pikachu, didn't it?

[Limewater]

Blaster Master Overdrive? I haven't completed it yet, so maybe there's some big reveal I'm missing, but it doesn't appear to have anything in common with the Worlds of Power book by "FX-9". I remember reading that as a kid, oddly enough.

Sorry, my mistake. It was the Playstation one. Blaster Master: Blasting Again.

I have a copy of the Worlds of Power Blaster Master book back at my parents house. I only remember reading Blaster Master, Simon's Quest, and Infiltrator, but I'm pretty sure that Blaster Master was my favorite. All three were surprisingly fun reads, though.

So should have all of the Pokemon kept their original Japanese names?

That's up to Nintendo, but I'd say it sure worked out fine for Pikachu, didn't it?

This statement appears to contradict your earlier statement that translators should not change names. What is the distinction in this case?

[flamepanther]

This statement appears to contradict your earlier statement that translators should not change names. What is the distinction in this case?

The distinction is that Nintendo as a whole is not a translator. If Nintendo needs something changed for a localization, I may not agree, but it's their call. If Joe The Translator down in the localization group does it "just because" without being asked to from higher up, then he's overstepping his job description.

[Inazuma]

So should have all of the Pokemon kept their original Japanese names?

I think so.

[Luke]

Luke Skywalker was originally Luke Starkiller. These aren't real people.

Really? I'm sure there is no man named Luke Limb-Runner either. AMIRITE or AMIRITE?

[Original_Name]

I agree that the name "Dr. Ivo Robotnik" makes me take the character far more seriously, even though Robotnik is an absurd surname for a person to have and in itself sounds like a nickname. Also, I might not make as big of a distinction if the character hadn't gone through such a huge change in presentation coinciding with the introduction of the "Eggman" moniker into the Western canon. As a youth playing the early Sonic games, I imagined Robotnik to be FAR more deranged than the 95% comical figure he was later presented as.

If I were to write the character, I would go with the notion in the first Sonic Adventure where he takes pride in the moniker "Dr. Ivo Robotnik", but Sonic teases him by calling him "Eggman". To explain the character's fascination with egg-shaped death machines, I'd just write him to be fixated with the irony of killing Sonic with a reference to the object he teasingly compares Robotnik to -- sort of like karma, "You want an egg, you wretched rodent? Then let me introduce you to the Death Egg, OOH-HOO-HOO-HOO." This stuff writes itself, people.

It seems like lately Sega doesn't like the idea of Robotnik being taken seriously, though, and "Eggman" suits a silly character better... it's a shame, because there's so much room there to make a brilliant character. I think that people go about the whole "market-the-product-to-kids" thing all wrong by making things so soft around the edges... kids don't like to be babied, they want to feel like they're really being edgy. I mean, that's why you see things like Goosebumps and Creepy Crawler Ovens doing so well, because they're "sick" and "deranged" in the eyes of kids -- that's how I saw Robotnik as a kid because of the influence of the SatAM cartoon and more directly just the reality of what he was doing in the video games before all the goofy jokes. I like him a hell of alot better that way, and as a kid I was very compelled by his egomaniacal, animal-torturing, hyper-polluting badassery.

[flamepanther]

He was always a fairly comical character in the games. This didn't really change, except that now it's next to impossible for the peripheral fiction to try to change that. If anything, the way Sonic Team presents the character now is almost like a blending of the previous Japanese/in-game and U.S. comic/TV presentations of the character.