German subtitles are writing him Ruffy. It is the English Internet that writes Luffy. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/OnePieceMonkeyDLuffy
And sadly even 1000+ episodes listening to Japanese have barely taught me anything.
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Ruffy is still an interesting choice, by default, does that read like roofy in German, or like roughy?
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like roofy
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I have a few more names that are translated differently in German than English.
German: Lorenor (Zoro)
English: Roronoa (Zoro)
From Apothecary Diaries
- Rifa vs Lihua
- Rihaku vs Lihaku
- 楼蘭 → ロウラン → Rouran (de) → Loulan (en)
So I take it there are two variants and German translations use the Romaji spelling or are at least more likely, too. Perplexity suggests this may be because “Germans in particular are used to reading almost phonetic spellings, so “Romaji” feels like normal name spelling to them.”
I am not sure because I mostly notice this with L/R sounds and this is specifically how English and German differ around the pronunciations of these two letters.
When I listened to the Japanese VA’s pronunciations, I cannot really tell the letters apart. It could be both Luffy and Ruffy to my ears.
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I wonder if Luffy was chosen to avoid similarities to “roofie,” the street name of the problematic drug
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Yeah, it’s kind of an in-between sound, could fall either way, but tends to be more like r I think.
But that’s not really what I was focusing on. In English, apparently unlike German, Luffy and Ruffy have u pronounced like “rough”, which is very distinct from u as in “Rupert”. It’s also a weird choice since I think most people would read Rufi and get it right. (Maybe not Lufi).
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Would probably have to spell it “Loofy”.
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Oh that sounds weird to my ears.
I forgot one that is also written very differently:
Usopp becomes Lysop in German. This is the one character where I really can’t wrap my head around the difference.