[silicon5]

Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era.

The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?

[totallymike]

This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.

[GolDDranks]

It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.

[totallymike]

I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series