Thread:Dalmatia/@comment-25979511-20170718164015/@comment-25979511-20170718221326

Romaji is the phonetics of the language in roman characters. Some characters and sounds do not have an equivalent in the Japanese language (such as single consonants, THs, Ls, etc.). If a name is foreign (not a Japanese name), you translate it as closely as you can according to the Japanese characters and sounds they have.

For instance, Tom is tomu in kana. It's the closest as you can get in their writing system. But you never tranlsate all the names based off the kana. If Japanese people write foreign names in roman characters (which is what romaji is), they write out "Tom." I don't know how else to explain this. Using Japanese characters to write T.O.M specifically is impossible. Which is why the "syllables" change when converting over. You don't convert Tom to トム back into Tomu. It's only two way. Does this make sense, I wonder?

More than anything, knowing the phoentics of a character's kana in that language doesn't provide anything. It's fine to have their name in its given Kanji or kana, but there's no point to have it in roman characters in accordance of their pronunciation of a foreign name.

TL;DR:

In the shortest of terms romaji literally means "roman characters." So romaji is not particular to Japanese. It's the same for any language that has to convert it's writting system like Chinese, Korean, Russian, etc. So with names that derive from other languages, you use the spelling used in that particular language. Since Tom or say Chris came from English, you just convert the name back into Tom or Chris rather than "tomu" or "kurisu." They're names originally from roman characters in the first place. Basically this person is looking at the components of the katakana than actually looking at the full name. It's almost like taking the components of a normal word like りんご and put into the roman characters "ringo" and calling it a translation, when it's not.

' -Kaede721, a translator for the Durarara fandom. '