MementoNepenthe said:
I just hope this time around we get "Amazones" and "Seiren," and no more "Princess Beryl" and "Spark Ring Wide Pressure."
"Spark Ring" was atrocious and like someone else pointed out, I believe it was corrected in future printings. "Princess Beryl" was also embarrassing and I remember the translator tried to defend it, as if we didn't have access to the Japanese text ourselves. Ridiculous.
On the other hand..."Amazones" and "Seiren" really shouldn't be anywhere near an English translation.
I've read the articles on Dies Gaudii about why "Amazones" might be the intended term, but I don't buy it at all. Takeuchi clearly used "Amazon" to refer to the trio (male) and "Amazoness" to refer to the quartet (female). Yes, the Amazons were female warriors in Greek mythology, but Takeuchi is clearly using the term "Amazon" to refer to the rain forest in the manga. Since the Amazon Trio members are male and the Amazoness Quartet members are female, it seems pretty clear that -ness (as a feminized version of Amazon, which is typical in English) is the intended spelling.
I always thought that the "Amazones" debate existed purely for the sake of being contrary. I don't think it holds up well at all.
You didn't bring this up yourself, but since it's associated with the Amazones/Amazoness debate: the term is also "quartet" and not "quartetto" -- the Japanese ALWAYS use "karutetto" to write "quartet" in Japanese katakana, as seen for the Japanese release of the film "Quartet" a few years ago.
Going by that logic...the term should be Aluminum Siren, not Aluminum Seiren. Yes, I know what the katakana says -- but the katakana is approximating the Greek word that is pronounced like "seiren" -- the English equivalent is "siren" and a search for "seiren" doesn't bring up anything resembling the creatures on Google. This is another instance of the Japanese approximating the original word (just like karutetto for quartet) but we don't need to use the original words in an English translation when we have perfectly usable English equivalents.
I would be all for using "Quartetto" and "Seiren" if the English language did not already have equivalent terms like "quartet" and "siren" that are arguably more readable and encompassing than random foreign words just because the Japanese language prefers to approximate the words from their original languages. Few people would call a siren a "seiren" just because that's how it's pronounced in Greek.
The reason why the Japanese approximate the word "seiren" from Greek as opposed to "siren" from English is because in English, a "siren" can also refer to an alarm. If the Japanese wrote "sairen" for Aluminum Siren, it would be interpreted as an alarm and not a creature from Greek mythology -- but in English, we do not make this distinction.