When it first came out, we always pronounced it as gi-a-ra-dos; wasn't until one showed up in the anime any of us knew that wasn't the official pronunciation. (Ponyta, it helps if you think of it as Pony-ta, it's pretty much just a suffix because... they could. Or possibly it's a pun in Japanese, that happens.)
Anyway, pokémon pronunciation is COMPLICATED at best, because some of the names are taken directly from the Japanese names, and others are changed entirely - usually to puns, but sometimes for no apparent reason. And IIRC some are half of one, half of the other, though I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
And that's not including the usual problems you get when translating - the further you go back, the worse translation standards were, and I wouldn't exactly call them great today, particularly in the US where you don't actually have to have any sort of qualification to work as a translator. Pokémon was always big-budget, which helps, but it's never been perfect. (It is, however, absolute strides above FFVII, which was released a year or two before. A bunch of the early game stuff is notoriously incoherent.)
So pronunciation vs spelling vs general common sense is pretty much a crapshoot! If it's important to you, you can definitely look it up, but anyone who isn't an asshole won't care if you pronounce something in a non-standard way!
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Date: 2016-08-31 02:46 pm (UTC)Anyway, pokémon pronunciation is COMPLICATED at best, because some of the names are taken directly from the Japanese names, and others are changed entirely - usually to puns, but sometimes for no apparent reason. And IIRC some are half of one, half of the other, though I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
And that's not including the usual problems you get when translating - the further you go back, the worse translation standards were, and I wouldn't exactly call them great today, particularly in the US where you don't actually have to have any sort of qualification to work as a translator. Pokémon was always big-budget, which helps, but it's never been perfect. (It is, however, absolute strides above FFVII, which was released a year or two before. A bunch of the early game stuff is notoriously incoherent.)
So pronunciation vs spelling vs general common sense is pretty much a crapshoot! If it's important to you, you can definitely look it up, but anyone who isn't an asshole won't care if you pronounce something in a non-standard way!