Talk:Sophie Bergmann

She's a character from Fullmetal Alchemist 3: The Girl Who Surpasses God.Hikaruyami-having fun* 20:35, April 25, 2011 (UTC)

Sofy/Sofi/Sophie
So, someone changed this to "Sofy"? Is that the official spelling? Honestly it looks on par with Viz's "Foo" (rather than "Fuu") to me; meaning, not good. At least "Sofi" is an actual name; I've never seen anything like "Sofy"; that looks like what someone who doesn't know how to spell's guess on how to spell either "Sophie" or "Sofi" Tommy-Vercetti (talk) 23:09, March 4, 2013 (UTC)


 * I was skeptical as well, but that's how it's stored in the game's data. (Screenshot from the game data.) 00:27, March 5, 2013 (UTC)

How's it spelled in the actual game though? There's got to be subtitles and text bubbles, all that. How something's spelled in game data's not really the best way to go by it in my opinion. I've seen countless data things that are just abbreviations and/or misspellings, because no one past who designed them is supposed to see them. I think we should go on how it's spelled in the actual game. Tommy-Vercetti (talk) 01:23, March 5, 2013 (UTC)


 * The game was only published in Japanese, so all we have are the katakana/kanji to go by: ソフィ・ベルクマン. There's no canon English translation, only the Japanese romanization (Sofi Berukuman). 16:35, March 5, 2013 (UTC)

Still, even with that being said, that's just the romaji of it. Like with this character: http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Heathcliff_Erbe

The romaji of this (before we knew better) was Heiss Cliff Arbor, but it's "Heathcliff". It may be "Sofi" or "Sophie", but I can safely say it's definitely not "Sofy". I liked "Sophie" the best, personally. Tommy-Vercetti (talk) 16:27, March 6, 2013 (UTC)

It makes absolutely no sense to make up names just for the sake of "staying true" to spelling of Oriental alphabets when the name was clearly made to be ocidental. ¬¬' That's "anime puritanism" and just plain dumb. Sorry to state it like that, but I've gotten really tired of these silliness over the years. Turdaewen (talk) 18:26, March 6, 2013 (UTC)


 * I personally prefer "Sophie" as well. It just makes sense to use the closest thing to an official source we have. I'd be okay "voting" on this, though, or whatever. "Sophie Bergmann" sounds like the intended name to me; Wikipedia and online translators seem to agree. 03:40, March 7, 2013 (UTC)

...I didn't think something as simple as a name spelling change would get such backlash... I don't think Sofy's name was a misspelling like Tommy-Vercetti suggests, since Elma and Havoc's names in the same data file are spelled the same way as they were supposed to be. But I suppose nobody can be sure how it was truly meant to be spelled until some English dub of the game is released. The Aracuan Bird (talk) 10:18, March 7, 2013 (UTC)

Well, actually, not even "English dubs" are mistake-proof, to be quite honest. They "guess it" just as much as we do. The only difference is that they have professionals who are fluent in Japanese, but, then, again, so do we!

Here in Brazil, for example, the official translation of "State Alchemist" is "Federal Alchemist", but all "specialists" in FMA know Amestris is not a Federation, but a Unitary State and, therefore, there cannot be a "Federal Alchemist". And, still, that's the official translation! With a HUGE mistake! But the thing is that there's not "right way to translate it" because there's no direct translation between katakanas/hiiraganas and our own alphabet. It's all about reading and trying to 'figure it out' what they meant by that spelling in Katakana. My name, Raquel, is spelled "Rakeru" in katakana, but anyone who's not japanese would figure it out that they actually mean "Raquel" and that my name is not "Rakeru". That happens with all languages that have a different alphabet! So, when we read "Sopy" is safe to assume they meant Sophie and spelling for us as Sopy would be the same as calling a character called "Raquel", "Rakeru" just because it was "written like that". - In other words, when translating from Japanese, you just need to use your common sense.

And I'm sorry if I sounded rude, but it's just that I had years discussing these sort of thing with anime fans, especially about Riza's name and, after a while, it just gets tiresome, especially when some of them are so prude as to think we should do everything "the japanese way" with no inteligence or adaptation whatsoever. And it doesn't help that most of those don't even speak Japanese to begin with. Turdaewen (talk) 15:39, March 7, 2013 (UTC)


 * I think there should definitely be a consensus on this matter.


 * Maybe "Sofy" is what they were going for; it's not entirely implausible for the FMA uninverse, like "Winry" is a real name either, but, no matter how I look at it, "Sofy" just looks like an atrocious misspelling. I think we were more on target with "Sophie".Tommy-Vercetti (talk) 16:12, March 7, 2013 (UTC)


 * I tend to agree. It seems like something that someone learning the language would write when sounding it out. We do need a consensus, yes. Let's see if we can reach an agreement. I've added a table below that seems to be the easiest and most democratic way to gather opinions from various members. To add a vote, place a line containing  #  in the appropriate section below. 22:15, March 8, 2013 (UTC)

And, welll, we never really decided the duration of this poll too. Like, how long do we wait? I doubt many more beside the 4 of us is going to add anything more. How about a week?Tommy-Vercetti (talk) 15:04, March 11, 2013 (UTC)


 * I had figured a week would be sufficient, yeah. 21:39, March 11, 2013 (UTC)