Thread:ShikiAwakusu/@comment-27631794-20170105030105/@comment-27631794-20170105043813

The u's are a smaller problem; there it seems to be an issue between maintaining the Japanese pronunciation of the name and dumbing it down for English speakers. I don't know Japanese, so I don't know if removing that letter changes the meaning of the character's name. While I prefer sticking to canon spellings, I don't really care if a u follows an o or not, I'd just like consistency across the wiki.

I think the issue with what we've seen so far with 'Sloan' and 'Varona' is that they were taking a Russian word and spelling it in Japanese and translating the Japanese to English, in which case they spelled according to the pronunciation; fine, but it loses its original meaning. The official English translation, though, chose to translate the original Russian meaning, rather than the Japanese spelling, and that's how we get Slon and Vorona, elephant and crow, which actually fit the characters well. I don't know how much Narita himself has to do with that website, which focuses on the anime and is over a year out of date, but it's clear through the novels that he wanted the meanings of his characters' names to have importance.