[The Weighting of Fonts]

2 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

That would work perfectly well for the game, though. 张伟 and 王芳 are not going to care that the characters they see don't mean "Gene" or "Linus."

Well, it'll make Gene & Wernher's names less amusing. Ah well; something is always lost in translation.

[The Weighting of Fonts]

On 2/14/2017 at 8:04 AM, Randox said:

So I'm wondering if the names were left in 'English' because there is simply no good way to translate them into Japanese(?), especially where a lot of the names are 'made up' and will lack existing translations, or if the prevalence of English on the world stage means that even non speakers are a lot better at dealing with our alphabet than I am dealing with Cyrillic, or Kanji, or any other non Latin Alphabet. Maybe both.

There is no good way to write western names in Japanese and Chinese. Trying with Japanese leads you to dumping vowels into your words left and right so it can be written as a chain of Japanese syllables. Chinese, however, is the real offender. There is no way to write a Western name in Chinese. All you can do is come up with a Chinese name, completely separate from the other one, and just use that.

I think it's safe to say that non-English speakers will at least know the Latin alphabet, although it's a sub-optimal solution to the problem. Localization is complicated.