Sachen's name in Chinese is given as
聖謙, which in Pinyin would be Shèng qiān. So how does one arrive at the "Sachen" and "Thin Chen" readings? Or are they just made-up words to sound better as a company name?
"Chen" is pretty close to how I understand "qiān" would be pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. The other half is probably meant to be a similar (if inaccurate) approximation.
Considering that Sachen is a Taiwan company, it is understandable to not use the more mainland Pinyin spelling.
Also, there is ABSOLUTELY no official standard (no matter what people tell you) for romanising Chinese characters, so whatever sounds close (and cool) is okay.
we can just call them Modest Monk and pretend they're a chant-rock band? (/joke)
Gilbert wrote:
Also, there is ABSOLUTELY no official standard (no matter what people tell you) for romanising Chinese characters, so whatever sounds close (and cool) is okay.
I understand that. What I don't understand is why put two different romanizations on the same title screen.
NewRisingSun wrote:
two different romanizations on the same title screen.
Where?
An image search for
sachen title screen brought two examples.
Middle School EnglishQuote:
Push Start
Sachen®
©1989 Thin Chin Enter. Corp.
By: L.C. Tchakvosky
Millionaire II (Chuugoku Taitei)Quote:
Start
Continue
Sachen®
©Thin Chin Ent.Co.,Ltd.
A few other games, such as
The Penguin and Seal, have "Sachen" on its own screen followed by a title screen with the Thin Chen copyright notice.
I don't see any abnormality there.
Sachen is the English name of their company as shown in their logo.
Thin Chen is their Romanised pronunciation of the Chinese name of their company.
The English name of a Chinese company is not necessarily the same (and not even necessarily related) as how it's supposed to be pronounced in Chinese.
Case in point: How do you romanize "Hon Hai" to "
Foxconn"?
Later games published by Bunch Games, such as
Tagin' Dragon,
Mission Cobra, and
Galactic Crusader, credit "Sachen Inc." on the title screen. Might that be Thin Chen's export subsidiary?
Actually in Mandarin Chinese (not otherwise actually, we non Mandarin speakers are actually baffled by this) sometimes treat sounds beginning with H and S interchangeable, and that H and F interchangeable, so one official Chinese translation for Sherlock Holmes sounds somewhat like "Halok Furmosi" to us (admittedly that this is more like how that would sound in Cantonese; if you read it in Mandarin it's closer to the original English).
Moreover, as shown in that wikipedia page you linked to, the company is actually more widely known as 富士康, which sounds VERY close to Foxconn.
Just on a related note, which is what's happening now here, that the content provider (and the big N itself) insisted on name changes to match the Mandarin version in Pokemon Sun+Moon (which sound awful unless pronounced in Mandarin, and this already happened in the games themselves), which caused the TV channel to rage quit and consider not to air the S+M anime after XYZ ends.