Hellsing DVD case wrote:But now, artificially spawned vampires have appeared, forcing Hellsing to call in their ultimate weapon – the rogue vampire, Arucard.
hellsingfaq wrote:Did you know Alucard is Dracula backwards?
Er, yeah. So does the rest of the world.
You morons! It's Arucard, not Alucard. Says so on the DVD package.
The nature of the Japanese language is such that certain translations from Japanese to English are not as precise as they could be. The most literal translation of Alucard's name is Aakaado, so either one is taking a certain amount of liberty from what's written in the manga. Even if his name were written Arukado, as it is for a certain dhampir in the Castlevania games, the sounds of l and r are interchangable in the Japanese language. In addition, the name is written in katakana, one of the two sets of symbols used to represent syllabic sounds in Japanese. Katakana is used almost exclusively for foreign words and names, indicating that the best attempt has been made to transliterate the sounds into Japanese. In such case, translating back to English must take this into account, and seek out not just a similar sounding word, but the word that was most likely to be meant by the author. Because of the obvious Dracula references, it seems clear that Alucard was the intended name. Pioneer just spelled it wrong. (And incidentally, if you want to insist that the "official" romanization is always right, the Dark Horse manga translates it "Alucard".)
So what, are we both wrong.