Danbooru

Tag discussion: horo vs. holo

Posted under General

Was this discussed before or after she wrote her name in roman letters as "Holo" in the anime? The one which became the "Korlo" meme.

Since her name is ホロ in katakana, which is used for foreign words and names, it's not like our romanization rules require it to be "ro".

It really should be "Holo", as that's the spelling the original author intended. We've gone with "Horo" just because that's what many fans thinks "sounds better", but I don't think we should go with a particular spelling on those grounds alone.

re ED:
Read about "Death of the Author". It talks about how the original author of an original work should be placed equally alongside the readers and critiques when it comes to interpreting said work.

In this case, just because the author wrote a popular piece of fiction, does not mean they know a great deal about the English language or translating to it. To take a more extreme example, say I wrote a book called "The ungrateful undead" and it became very popular. If I translated it into German with google translate to "Der undankbare Untoten" (which is wrong), then German-speaking people would ignore that and use the proper translation.

Now, I'm not saying the author of Horo is "wrong", per se, but the point is that we would go with the translation that makes the most sense to us and romanization that sounds/looks best to us, regardless of whether the author came to the same translation in our language or not.

After all, don't we ignore chamupei's toranzurashions to make the meanings consistent? So why shouldn't we romanize ほろ to "Horo" make the spelling consistent?

tl;dr: the author has nothing to do with it; it is agreed by most on danbooru that the Japanese ろ is romanized to "ro" and Horo should not be an exception just because the author said otherwise.

It's ロ, not ろ and it's a transliteration, not a translation.

Also
クラフト・ロレンス (くらふとろれんす)
Craft or
Kraft, German word for force, strength

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S1eth said:
It's ロ, not ろ and it's transliteration, not a translation.

Also
クラフト・ロレンス (くらふとろれんす)
Craft or
Kraft, German word for force, strength

No, "Kurafuto Rorensu".

Joke aside, I agree with you. 「ホロ」 is written in katakana, the author intended for it to be a transliteration of "Holo", and it's a valid name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holo ). In particular, I think it's a reference to the Swedish village.

Personally, I'm in favor or renaming to Holo. It's written as a loan-word would be, and it's a valid name in the character's homeland. Danbooru's howto:romanize policy states that foreign words that are recognizably from another language should be rendered in that language's way of writing.

IMHO, if that's what the author meant, then that's what we should use. It's his character.

I really prefer Horo, but for tagging purposes she probably should be tagged holo. There's nothing wrong with Romanizing the name to Holo and it is the intended Romanization, so the only reason we should tag it Horo is the opinion that it sounds better and apparently more people are familiar with it. Which, I believe, isn't a valid reason for going against the official spelling. (We stopped using the fairy_wars tag and replaced it with yousei_daisensou if I remember correctly, for example.)

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I also like Horo over Holo more for aesthetic reasons than anything else. Of course if there is a good argument for Holo (say the author notes what she is named after), we should go with that. Without that though, I'd say we stay with what we have.

If we do go with the name "Holo" we should have a qualifier in the name (so it'd be Holo_(spice_and_wolf)) and leave the "holo" tag empty with a wiki that directs to hologram or to this character.

D'Eye said:
Official transliteration

Is there more details on this than just this comment? Because everyone was giving me the impression that the author was known to be involved in deciding the spelling, all this informs me is that it was the licensor and they're just assuming that the original editorial staff and author were involved.

Does Tokyo MX count?

As for Western sources, FUNimation, ANN, MAL, Wikipedia (who links to Yen Press) and (well) Spice & Wolf Wiki all are using l; everyone just mentions the Japanese licensor's (ASCII Media Works, I guess) directive as a reason.

All of the major sites prefer spelling with l, so well... It looks pretty official.

The sad thing is, when Japanese authors give their characters not-so-Japanese names, they're almost never care to explain how these names should be written in source language.

There is this one guy who repeatedly claims to know the etymology of her name and his sources are terrible:

Vexx says:
The word "ホロ" means "wolf" in the language of the Ainu (source: my own research into Ainu legends and its use in some Japanese literature).

wikipedia, do not trust me :
horkew (ホㇿケゥ) - wolf (also horokew in some dialects)

Even then, I don't know what writing system the Ainu used or if there is an official romanization for it.

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