Monday, May 16, 2016

I've been following this manhwa called TAL off and on for the past five years or so. When I tried reading the most recent chapter I realized I had no idea what the hell was going on and decided to blast through all 137 chapters of it. I have a bit of a mental block on Korean names, so I maintained a list to keep abreast of who's who:

Little did I know this shit would be useless. At one point they started talking about this dude "Paekchong" and it took me a few panels to realize they were referring to Baek Jeong, the dude who eats a lot. As I said, this series has been out for about five years. It's rare for a scanlation group to keep the same translator the entire time, so people have shuffled in and out, working on this series with their own transliteration method. Why the hell can't Korean get its shit together? Most Japanese follow the Hepburn system and China's pushing pinyin. I admittedly don't know anything about Korean, but there is a significant difference between "paekchong" and "baekjeong." And it wasn't just that one name. Almost every single one on that list has some other deformed variation. I've heard "Revised Romanization of Korean" is the most commonly used, but if that were the case I wouldn't have to deal with this shit, not only with this manhwa but practically every single one I've read in my life.

No comments:

Post a Comment