Well, the official title of Bokura ga Ita is ‘We Were There’ which is how the manga is titled (on wikipedia and ANN). Now the anime apparently is titled differently.

As for Kimi ni Todoke, that’s another fringe one, though I think it’s a double title, ‘Kimi ni Todoke: From Me To You.’ Or ‘Reaching You.’

It’s okay to call it differently though, it’s natural and that’s the purpose of aliases and semantic linking… of course most sites aren’t using that sort of name resolution and get stuck with one title…. or having to know a numerical ID of something.

Wikipedia does names right (that’s how we can refer to a page), but doesn’t have aliases outside of alternate language pages. Add an alias engine to Wikipedia, and resolve titles based on a give ‘type’ or category… and that’s basically a good concept ^^ (.implemented)

Keroro Gunsou is only a bitch because of the onomatopoeia. Sergeant Keroro should work fine. (Since Keroro is also a name here.)

…Ouran High School Host Club…Melancholy of Haruhi…Library War…Hayate the Combat Butler… Ghost in the Shell…

These too; I clearly recognize them. Library War only passes because no other show has its premise.

Any titles with names are fair for translation. While those consisting entirely of common words are…

Thanks for mentioning Bokura ga Ita. This is my concern with shoujo titles earlier. Say you are browsing Animeblogger Antenna. Would you be able to draw the connection between We Were There and Bokura ga Ita? Even if you are fluent in Japanese.

Incidentally, I had to double-check your From Me to You post yesterday: “This is suppose to be Kimi ni Todoke, right?”

We need a big list of titles and their romanji counterparts…. actually, just looking at some of my logged stuff… with that list there’s less than 10% on the fringe (could fall either way, might be easier call it by name). There’s a bunch which can use romanji because they are really short or proper (Ga-Rei, Mushi-shi, Gintama, sola). Then there are a bunch which are pointless to use the romanji name (Eureka 7, Ouran High School Host Club, Fullmetal Alchemist, 5cm per second, Melancholy of Haruhi, Library War, Honey + Clover, Crest/Banner of the Stars, Hayate the Combat Butler, Ghost in the Shell … I SHOULD JUST MAKE THE GROUPINGS WITH THE LIST LUL…

The debatable one’s are the most interesting… like Keroro Gunsou, Zero no Tsukaima (Familiar of Zero sounds just dumb), … uh, and others… Bokura ga Ita (We Were There), dunno.

We could probably turn this into a science if we enumerated enough and then built a set of equations/rules.

LOL

Those are good examples, but most titles do not have identifiable translations.

Example: Shoujo titles are typically generic. They can easily mix with Western titles.

Though I can understand using them for consistency with the few viable translations.

Could just use the official jp titles, but usually a viable translation exists.

Yes, I caught where it says “usually”. Guess we’re exposed to different translated titles… or something. \(o_o)/

Let’s just say in principle, reading romanji is worse than reading paragraphs in all hiragana… it’s just more difficult to make sense of it. Aroduc’s method is logical. ^^

One-word titles can go either way (ie. Toradora, Shigofumi), same with abbreviations.