Dreamwriter said:
I disagree. If something is easier to pronounce or just sounds better, then it's a perfectly good translation even if it differs from the original material. Specifically talking about town names, think about Seattle. It was named after a guy whose name is pronounced something like "Shee-ahhh-ptchl", but I don't think many people would call Seattle a "mistranslation".
I don't want to cause any derail of this thread, but I think it's interesting to clarify this further.
You see, you're right in stating that certain names can have a different (or even better) phonetical result in regards to how the public
perceives them. That difference in ease does increase even more when we compare how different cultures perceive respectively foreign names.
That said, such a difference is nothing but a subjective quality that concerns a perception.
When you deal with something (like a movie, a videogame, a book, any work of art in the broadest sense) that has been created in a certain form and composition, with a certain more or less evident intention, and you need to localize its content, I think it's very important that a good translation always stays faithful to its objective source and merely provides that product in its entirety to a new public, keeping it like it was intended.
Translation isn't the creation of a new work of art, nor is the translator an author.
It's an important principle, because if we concede that anything is changeable in art (again this is used in the broadest and most generic way possible) as long as it is "felt" subjectively better by a specific and arbitrary public, any destructive approach is allowed in the name of a personal sensibility.
Of course, if we put them in perspective, videogames are a trivial matter. But this happens everywhere at much more important levels: cinema, literature, philosophy. And the results of such a logic are more and more destructive everyday.