Tag Alias Reversal: Itou_Noiji -> Ito_Noizi

Reversal: Itou Noiji -> Ito Noizi

Reason: Official romanization of name

Found this while I was showing some friends her work. Having just previously debated how her name was romanized with them, it seemed rather silly that it was like that on Danbooru as well.

Her official romanization is wrong.

If it's the artist's choice in how their name is spelled in English, can you really call it wrong?

Yes. Welcome to danbooru where if you aren't using a made-up non-japanese name your romanization is most likely wrong.

Bastille said:
If it's the artist's choice in how their name is spelled in English, can you really call it wrong?

Danbooru has a standardized romanization method, we override official romanizations fairly often.

Romanizing "Itou" as "Ito" is wrong and confusing, as both いとう and いと are legitimate surnames. "Noizi" is more of a stylistic thing but isn't with Danbooru's standard on romanization and makes it easier for Westerners to mispronounce her name.

If nothing else, I now have a great question to ask Ms. Ito when I interview her in three weeks time. See what she thinks about people romanizing her name as Noiji Itou instead of Noizi Ito.

Bastille said:
If nothing else, I now have a great question to ask Ms. Ito when I interview her in three weeks time. See what she thinks about people romanizing her name as Noiji Itou instead of Noizi Ito.

I honestly doubt it'll matter to her much.

Bastille said: If nothing else, I now have a great question to ask Ms. Ito when I interview her in three weeks time. See what she thinks about people romanizing her name as Noiji Itou instead of Noizi Ito.

You'd waste interview time with such a talented and popular artist to ask an asinine question like that? That's a bit sad.

1) She won't care.
2) Even if she does, we won't care that she cares.

And it's Itou Noiji here anyway, not Noiji Itou.

My interpretation of the situation:

Danbooru was originally a rather closed community with specialized interests. It has never set a goal to educate the great public on how individual Japanese names are officially romanized.

Instead, the core userbase is highly interested in how names are pronounced and written in Japanese. A standardized romanization practice is a means to help with that. Actually, if knowledge of hiragana was a bit more widespread in the western countries, I doubt romanizations would be used here at all.

Try to look at Danbooru romanizations more like you look at phonetic notations in a school textbook, and you might get the idea.

Danbooru does not encourage people to write "Itou Noiji" in other contexts. It encourages people to rely on Wikipedia and similar sources when in doubt. Why ever would you use Danbooru rather than Wikipedia as a reference when debating a spelling with your friends?

In the case of Itou Noiji ~ Ito Noizi, the English Wikipedia gives the official romanization, the hiragana spelling, a Hepburn romanization for those interested in the approximate pronunciation, and an alternate romanization. The article even points out (although without providing a source) that the official romanization uses the Kunrei-shiki system.

Indeed, her name is 【いとうのいぢ】, how its spelled in roman letters is, quite frankly, immaterial to her.

Immaterial? I would not go as far as claiming that.

Some Japanese artists, like Yoshitoshi ABe, do like playing with romanizations.

jxh2154 said:
You'd waste interview time with such a talented and popular artist to ask an asinine question like that? That's a bit sad.

1) She won't care.
2) Even if she does, we won't care that she cares.

And it's Itou Noiji here anyway, not Noiji Itou.

Well, like all the questions I'm compiling to potentially ask her, it will boil down in the end to "How much time do we have?" and "Which of these could result in interesting answers?". I'm not the one making the call in the end on what questions get asked, the person responsible for me even having a press pass in the first place will be.

Which reminds me, since Danbooru has the community that it does, they'd probably have some worthwhile questions to ask her. Should I bother linking the site that I'm using to collect the questions on, or no?

It'd be interesting to see if she knows (and if so, approves/disapproves) of Danbooru. Although it may be a case of "let sleeping dogs lie". Your call, I'd definitely be interested in her response though. :)

Katajanmarja said:
Actually, if knowledge of hiragana was a bit more widespread in the western countries, I doubt romanizations would be used here at all.

I think the main point of (our brand of) romanized tags is that they are easy to input, which is of course super important for tags. It's why we went away from tags with strange symbols such as black★rock_shooter. The fact we like to romanize them "properly" is just a matter of stylistic preference, and a certain measure of "objective truth" in tagging. In the same vein, we also use real names over nicknames (if possible).

Thank you, スラッシュ, good points.

Anyway, this topic inspired me to return to howto:romanize. I added some clarifications and even some disclaimer-like stuff into the introduction part. Those who are more experienced, feel free to improve the text.

Also note that in the vast majority of cases, we will provide aliases from the official name to our "bootleg" version, so there's no sacrifice of practicality.

Katajanmarja said: Anyway, this topic inspired me to return to howto:romanize. I added some clarifications and even some disclaimer-like stuff into the introduction part. Those who are more experienced, feel free to improve the text.

Hm, I removed this: "The Danbooru community does not promote its romanization practice to be used elsewhere." True, we don't (well, can't) force it on anyone anywhere else, but that sentence doesn't seem to be worded right - "promote" is vague. Personally, I rather do promote the idea of other places following our approach. Basically, we can't tell others to use it but it certainly would be a great thing if they did. So when you say "Danbooru does not encourage people to write "Itou Noiji" in other contexts," my response is (and don't take this the wrong way) - speak for yourself! I certainly encourage it. But neither of us (no one person, not even albert) "is" Danbooru in the abstract sense anyway, so we can't speak for it either.

That's why I wish I could rewrite the name order section of the non-wiki /help page. I've always really hated the wording because it makes it sound like we're "ashamed" of implementing an original name order scheme. On the contrary I'm damn proud of Danbooru for following such a practice with such discipline.

In the next bit I also stressed that the goal of the romanization scheme is consistency first; the rest is, while important, secondary.

As for asking Itou about Danbooru, probably not a good idea. For all I know she may not care, but really it just sounds like a good way to have a knee-jerk C&D brought down on us, especially since I doubt she'll really get what the heck Danbooru is at first.

We have our standards of romanisation and they're in place for a reason. These standards explicitly include ignoring "official" romanisations because they're almost always wrong. That's not up to a discussion and I'm honestly not very interested in her opinion on that. There are infinitely more interesting things I'd ask her, which brings me to the second point:

Bastille said:
Which reminds me, since Danbooru has the community that it does, they'd probably have some worthwhile questions to ask her. Should I bother linking the site that I'm using to collect the questions on, or no?

Absolutely, definitely yes, I do have questions. She's quite possibly my favouritest artist, there are millions of things I'd ask. As for linking, whatever is easier for you, but I'll just leave the questions here:

• How does she do colouring? What tools does she use, are there any particular tricks to getting the colours so vivid?
• What are the primary tools? Is it a single app from beginning to end, or does she switch? Does she ever use templates for the "I've done this scene so many times" situations, or is it always from scratch?
• Does she ever draw real sketches (as in, pencil and paper) for ideas nowadays, or is it fully digital? If not using sketches for the basis of game works, does she still draw practice/doodles/one-off things with traditional media?
• What's the technique for drawing eyes? This is the #1 element of her trademark style, how do you get that effect?
• What's the favourite element / pose / body part to draw, and what is the hardest? Does she prefer drawing girls or guys?
• Does she ever mind / get fed up with drawing ero stuff? Would she want to switch to non-ero if given the chance, or is she rather sticking with primarily ero works by choice? Are there any particularly preferred / disliked scenes?
• How common are women in the eroge industry, and is it difficult being one? Is it a satisfying job overall? Was it difficult to start drawing smut? Does she ever get embarassed by what she does for a living?
• How much of actual drawing does she do in games? Does she draw every scene herself, or is it only the key ones, or just the chara design and overall direction? Does she have an army of fanatically devoted assistants, or a handful of elite assistants, or just a single, elderly, somewhat stiff and always impeccably dressed assistant who can in addition brew unmatched tea?
• When did she start drawing? Did she do doujins before games? Has she ever published ero doujins she wasn't technically allowed to see because of being a minor? How long did it take to make a name for herself? Was it a long, arduous way from assistant's assistant up, or did she get discovered, or maybe took the industry by storm?
• What does she enjoy reading, and what are her favourite artists?

That'd be it for now, I'll add more if I have anything particularly brilliant come to mind.

jxh2154 said:
As for asking Itou about Danbooru, probably not a good idea. For all I know she may not care, but really it just sounds like a good way to have a knee-jerk C&D brought down on us, especially since I doubt she'll really get what the heck Danbooru is at first.

Oh yes, that. While I'm terribly interested in the possibility to ask her some questions, "what do you think of danbooru" is definitely not one of them. It's asking for trouble. Maybe she'll love it, but the odds are rather that she won't, and even if she likes it, the company's lawyer might have a different opinion. Please don't mention danbooru in any way more specific than "a fan site", and don't mention the name.

I have one:
"What's with the lemons?"