Meaning of a fictional place-name: 星嶺鷹守学園


This phrase has helpful but rather confusing furigana (星嶺鷹守学園{セイレイタカガミガクエン}).

I'm reading it to mean "star-ridge takagami campus", with star ridge being the
name of the specific campus and takagami being the place/town.

In more correct(?) English, "Star-ridge campus of/in Takagami".

Taking 鷹守{タカガミ} literally would be "falcon director(of the provincial
governors under the ritsuryo system)" which makes no sense.

How do Japanese people read/tell fictional place created by entertainment
media?




Simply, 星嶺鷹守学園 is one long proper noun. So you should translate it as "Seirei
Takagami Academy/School/etc" without thinking of the etymology. You don't want
New York to be translated as 新ヨーク even if "new" definitely means 新 :-)

And it's very difficult to analyze this phrase "etymologically", too. Of
course it's easy to split it into kanji and explain the meaning of each kanji
("star-ridge-hawk-protector"), but basically, both 星嶺 and 鷹守 come off to me as
simple "names" to me. 鷹守 might mean something else somewhere in the history,
but I'm not familiar with such a job anyway.

Note:

  * Alternatively, you may translate it even as "Seirei Takagami Gakuen Academy" or something like that. It's like "Rio Grande river", "Mont Blanc mountains", though.
  * "X Campus" is simply "Xキャンパス" in Japanese (eg "○○学園(の)△△キャンパス").

