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So after reading some manga, I came to realize that many names change over the
course of the story.

For example:

  1. One Piece:

    * The princess of Alabasta had her name written as 
      * Bebe
      * BB
      * vv
      * And concluded with Vivi
  2. Attack on Titan Before the fall

    * Darius's son had his name as 
      * Chabi
      * Xavi
    * His sister: 
      * Charle
      * Sharle
    * So I'm guessing Xenophon could have also been: 
      * Chenofon or something like that (That's just a guess)
  3. Detective Conan

    * The "Famous Detective" 
      * Kogoro
      * And Togo (in some parts)

What is the reason for that?


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japanese-language
Why do Japanese names change within a manga to have various forms at different times?


# Overview

Most of your examples have to do with the fact that converting a "Western"
name into the Japanese syllabary is a
[lossy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression) operation, meaning
that it's not always possible to reverse-engineer out the original "Western"
name just by looking at how it's written in Japanese.1

It's not that the names are changing over the course of the story, it's that
the translators are translating the same name in different ways at different
points in time.

# Examples

> The princess of Alabasta had her name written as

Her name in Japanese is written ビビ, which is romanized _bibi_. So you can see
how one might think this is from "BB". But one could also plausibly think that
it's supposed to be "Bebe" with a long "e" /i/.

The other problem is that historically, Japanese did not have the "v" sound
/v/, and used /b/ in its place, so you can see how one might come up with "VV"
or "Vivi" too. (My impression is that Japanese is in the process of developing
/v/ on account of loanwords; cf.
<https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/24498/>.)

> Darius's son had his name as

His name in Japanese is written シャビィ, which is romanize _shabii_. In English,
there are many ways of representing the "sh" /ʃ/ sound. Think of words like
_**sh** ingle_ or _**ch** ute_. In other languages that use a Latin-derived
alphabet, there are still other ways. Consider, for example, the Spanish
footballer [Xavi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavi) \- whose name in
Japanese is spelt シャビ _shabi_ , which only differs in vowel length. I suspect
that whoever romanized it as "Xavi" was taking inspiration from Spanish.

(And again, the "b"/"v" thing from before still applies.)

> His sister

Her name is written シャルル, which is romanized _sharuru_. This is the standard
Japanese spelling of the English name "Charles", but since the character is a
woman and "Charles" is almost exclusively masculine, I'm guessing the
translators were forced to pick a similar-sounding approximation instead. The
above comments about how "sh" is written apply here too.

> So I'm guessing Xenophon could have also been

This character's name is written ゼノフォン _zenofon_. A reasonable translator
would immediately jump to "Xenophon" for this because "Xenophon" is a real
name, while theoretically-plausible alternatives like "Xennofaun" and "Zen
O'Fon" are not. But you're correct - there are other English spellings that
could have been written in Japanese as _zenofon_.

> The "Famous Detective"

I don't know what's going on here - the character's name is plain old Japanese
毛利小五郎 Mōri Kogorō, and I don't know why anybody would read his personal name
as "Togo". However, I don't read _Detective Conan_ , so if there's a plot
reason for this (maybe he goes by an alias or something at one point), I
wouldn't know.

# Discussion

This is a recurring problem that plagues translations of all anime and manga
that feature characters with names that aren't either Chinese or Japanese.
(Chinese typically can be reverse-engineered correctly because the names will
be written in kanji, meaning you can just read off the modern Mandarin
pronunciations for the characters. Note, though, that [other issues sometimes
occur when romanizing Chinese names in Japanese
media](https://anime.stackexchange.com/q/37426/).)

Sometimes, official guidance about English spellings will be provided by the
author or publisher, in which case you can just go with those. (Though, be
warned, sometimes they pick objectively _terrible_ spellings. I distinctly
recall _Heavy Object_ being particularly ludicrous here.)

Absent official guidance, translators have to take their best guess. This gets
difficult when the names of the characters in a given anime/manga are names
that are either extremely rare or outright do not exist in the real world - at
that point, you're basically pulling guesses out of your nether regions. This
was a _huge_ issue for _Akame ga Kill_ \- see the table below, where
"unofficial" means what the fan translations thought the name was before
official guidance was provided. (This isn't even an exhaustive list!)

[code]

    ╔══════════╦══════════════╦════════════╦══════════╗
    ║ Japanese ║ Romanization ║ Unofficial ║ Official ║
    ╠══════════╬══════════════╬════════════╬══════════╣
    ║ マイン   ║ main         ║ Mein       ║ Mine     ║
    ║ ブラート ║ buraato      ║ Burat      ║ Bulat    ║
    ║ ラバック ║ rabakku      ║ Rabac      ║ Lubbock  ║
    ║ シェーレ ║ sheere       ║ Schere     ║ Sheele   ║
    ║ エスデス ║ esudesu      ║ Esdese     ║ Esdeath  ║
    ║ ラン     ║ ran          ║ Ran        ║ Run      ║
    ╚══════════╩══════════════╩════════════╩══════════╝
    
[/code]

# Notes

1 By contrast, we can almost always determine the correct Japanese spelling of
a name by reading a Nihon-shiki romanization of the name, though we can't
determine which kanji were used to write it. This is partly to do with the
relative phonological richness of English as compared to Japanese, and partly
to do with the fact that the Japanese "alphabet" is a syllabary (making
transliteration difficult), whereas the English alphabet is indeed an
alphabet, and a highly non-phonetic one at that.


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answer