Recent Changes
Linking Policy
Naming Policy

Mobile Suit Gundam, Z Gundam, Gundam ZZ, Char's Counterattack, Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, Gundam F91, Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Gundam 0083: Last Blitz of Zeon, Gundam: The 08th MS Team, and Gundam W: Endless Waltz are copyright Sotsu Agency and Sunrise. V Gundam, G Gundam, Gundam W, and Gundam X are copyright Sotsu Agency, Sunrise and TV Asahi. Turn A Gundam is copyright Sotsu Agency, Sunrise and Fuji TV.

Naming Policy

As you explore this site, you may come to wonder what method we're using to translate the Japanese names and terminology of the original Gundam stories. For the linguistically curious, we've drawn up some notes on our translation and nomenclature policy.

Rendering Names

Most proper nouns in Gundam, including the names of characters, places, and mobile suits, are written in the phonetic Japanese alphabet known as katakana. There are a few different systems for rendering this alphabet into English words, and frequently there are several posible ways to pronounce or spell a given word.

Where we're reasonably confident that there's a correct or official way to spell a name, we'll almost always go with it. For example, the spellings of character names in Gundam W seem to be consistent in every Japanese publication that attempts to write them in English, so we may reasonable suspect that the Sunrise animation studio has established standard spellings. This is literally true in the case of the original Gundam story, for which Sunrise has belatedly drafted a bona fide official English glossary. The domestic release of Gundam through AnimeVillage.com diverges from the Sunrise lexicon in some respects, so we've given ourselves dispensation to pick and choose our favorite spellings from either version.

There's another consideration in rendering names - ease of prounciation. For example, it's been more or less confirmed that the mobile suit Qubeley is named after Asia Minor's goddess Cybele, but the latter spelling has no correlation with how the mobile suit's name is spoken by the characters. For this reason, we've opted for a few non-standard spellings like "Gow," "Jaburo," et al, on the grounds that they're easier to pronounce correctly that "Gau," "Gaw," "Jabrow" or what have you.

Translating Ranks

While the English language has different words for the equivalent officer ranks in the army and navy, the Japanese language does not. Thus, a given Japanese rank, like taii, could equally well be translated as "captain" or "lieutenant," depending on whether we're talking about army or navy ranks. However, the Japanese terminology for non-commissioned officers is service-specific, and Gundam definitely uses army ranks for the lower echelons.

Thus, we're faced with a dilemma when it comes to translating ranks, which we have to do quite a lot in Gundam. On the one hand, it seems weird to use army ranks for characters who spend so much time hanging around on ships (albeit spacefaring ones). On the other hand, mixing army ranks like "sergeant" and "corporal" with navy ones like "ensign" and "commander" is an even bigger headache. Sure, we could pick arbitrary naval ranks for non-commissioned officers, but in the interests of precision we've finally decided to use army ranks across the board. We apologize for any confusion this may cause, but at least it's consistent.

We're allowing one exception to this principle. The Japanes language provides two forms of address for high-ranking military leaders: shogun, meaning "general," and teitoku, meaning "admiral." In the original Gundam series, two major Earth Federation leaders are General Revil and Admiral Tianem, who bear the titles shogun and teitoku respectively. This is the one instance where the appropriate form of address is unambiguous, and so we'll let Tianem proudly bear his naval title.