Yes! It's so unnecessary and annoying. Prime example, when 'Fools' got officially translated and their names got changed into ~American names~. Honestly, it got confusing at some point because I had to re-assign the characters with the new names as the story was wrapping up. Like, you could have translated and kept the names as it is??
Just like from "fools" webtoon they decided to change up the name too and there was like a reason why they did that but i forgot if the reason existed or nah but i do remember searching up why they changed it cause it was SHIT imagine getting attavhed to the names and that it suddenly changed from woohyun to jason and Hanyul to Jack, my gooooddd
Spirit Fingers is one of my favourite webtoons but when I found out they americanized the names I was disappointed
Oh my god, I hate that too! I’ve dropped many a webtoon when I see it’s supposed to be Chinese but the characters have the most generic western names possible. I’ve noticed it’s usually the Chinese ones that get this treatment. Off the top of my head I can’t remember coming along a Korean webtoon/manwha that had this happen. Except for My boyfriend is a vampire.
It’s like they want to make it “easier” for people not usually into anime, manga, manhua, manwha, etc to “get into” it, but the way I see it, those people are not going to pick up webtoon etc because the names are more familiar and the ones that already read these are willing to put in the effort to try and learn how to pronounce foreign names. For example, when I started reading The Kong’s Avatar I was butchering a lot of the names so I googled how to pronounce Chinese names and of course I’m not proficient or anything but at least now I know the “zh” sounds something akin to “j” or some such.
Yeah and honestly I feel like doing it for that reason is the worst reason possible. It’s pandering to a narrow worldview instead of encouraging people to take in other cultures the way that you did and it sucks
Anybody else really hate it when official webtoon translations change the characters’ names to Americanized ones? It just feels like unnecessary whitewashing as if people aren’t capable of reading korean names or something