Talk:Choka Shi

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I'm just going to say that I think it's extremely unlikely that this is the correct reading of her name. Using "Shi" as a surname is pretty unprecedented, but that character has several nanori readings that would be totally appropriate.

But… do we even know for sure that her surname is one character and her given name is two characters? ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 19:02, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Never mind, I looked at the tweet and saw that the reading was explicitly given. Alright then. You can ignore this. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 19:05, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

I think her name is actually "Choko Murasaki". The kanji for her last name is the kanji "紫" (Murasaki), while her name (丁香) it seems to sound as "Chōkō" Karminja (talk) 06:32, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Have you actually seen the tweet? It's very specific about giving the reading, even using furigana. I don't think there's any room for debate here. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 18:44, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I know I said using "Shi" as a surname is unprecedented, but that's not quite true. That was with an implicit "in Japan" qualifier. In fact, it is used as a surname in China, so if she's intended to be Paola (who speaks Chinese in Beachside Bonds) then it actually makes sense. That said, Choka seems pretty Japanese to me. Maybe she's half-Chinese? ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 13:56, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Maybe I've seen the wrong tweets, but the one I saw auto-translated their names with Grok. Plus, considering the many times Mabayu's name has been misread, it may very well be that the current names are still approximations. I don't actually know anything about phonetics, but when I saw that Paola girl's surname was Shi, I thought it would be Xi or something. ~ Sweet Beanie (talk) 14:48, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I saw it auto-translated too, but 1) you can see the furigana in the image and 2) you can click "Show original" to see the untranslated text. Also, the tweet is here, just in case you saw a different one (I doubt it though). ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 16:00, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Why was "Lilac" removed? That seems worth mentioning, since it's presumably the meaning of the kanji or something. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 19:31, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

I think it's still premature to conclude that Zi Ding Xiang is her official name. We currently have two contradictory sources – a tweet in Japanese, which clearly states her name is Choka Shi (without any ambiguity), and a trailer in English, which clearly states her name as Zi Ding Xiang (again, without any ambiguity). They can't both be right. In a situation like this, I'm more inclined to trust the Japanese source, as the trailer could've easily been hastily translated and the translator may have had to guess at her name. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 05:58, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

You know that common practices for fictional characters' conversions between CN→JP and CN→EN (and both in ← direction) differ, right? Like, Xingqiu from Genshin Impact, her official name in the EN ver of the game is the pinyin romanization of her Chinese name (with tones omitted), while her name in the Japanese version of the game takes the hanzi of her name and applies Japanese kun'yomi pronunciation of the kanji, rendering the romanization of her Japanese name as "Yukuaki".

Similarly, Zi Ding Xiang's Japanese pronuncation just uses pronunciations of the kanji/hanzi that already exist in Japanese: 紫(kun'yomi) 丁(on'yomi)香(kun'yomi). English treats Chinese names differently, so they went with pinyin instead. Both Zi Ding Xiang and Choka Shi are official and correct, but Zi Ding Xiang is what the *English* version officially uses, so we should as well EPF (talk) 07:32, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

That argument doesn't really make sense. Why would they add furigana for a different pronounciation than what they intended? Using Genshin Impact as an example is also kind of weak, as Chinese is the source language in that case, whereas here the source language is Japanese (even if this specific character is Chinese). Either way though, I say we should wait and see. Once the movie is actually out, it'll likely be more clear-cut, and we can update it then. It's quite possible you're right and it should be Zi Ding Xiang; and it's also possible you're wrong and someone translating the trailer messed up. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 01:31, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Because a different pronunciation is intended for a Japanese audience, and a different pronunciation is intended for an English-speaking audience.

Hanzi/kanji, that is the common writing system between Japanese and Chinese, happens to be logographic:

• "In a written language, a logogram [...] or logograph [...] is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages [most relevantly here Japanese, historically also Korean and Vietnamese] are logograms."

This means that a person fluent in Japanese and a person fluent in (traditional) Chinese have a subset of characters they'll both recognize the meaning of (though typically not pronunciation - kanji in Japan have pronunciations both based in historically native Japanese vocabulary, and loanwords from older forms of Chinese that just don't have the same pronunciation in modern Chinese anymore) - I hope we can both recognize that meaning of the name is quite important. So because the meaning of the name is important, it's common in Japanese to preserve the meaning of someone's name, rather than the pronunciation. This may apply to:

• Historical figures: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8A%89%E7%B6%99%E5%85%83 (JP pronunciation: Ryuu Keigen, compare to English article name "Liu Jiyuan")
• Some of modern-day immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rin_Kaiho
• Some fictional characters, both from media written by Japanese (ZDX in MadoMagi) and Chinese creators (Xingqiu in Genshin)

(but doesn't have to: for modern celebrities, some other modern-day immigrants, and some other fictional characters, katakana might be used, the same way it's used for western names)

(For real-life people, using only on'yomi (Chinese-loaned pronunciation of kanji) is more common from what I've googled, for fictional characters the rules are less strict, so you'll see kun'yomi (native Japanese pronunciation of kanji) more often. ZDX uses both kun'yomi and on'yomi, Genshin girl uses just kun'yomi, for example.)

So PMMM creators decided to make their Chinese girl use hanzi/kanji in her name with a Japanese kanji reading-based pronunciation, with very visibly clear meaning relating to the lilac flowers. That's where "Shi Choka" comes from - if they wanted a modern Chinese-based katakana spelling, it would be something more-or-less like "ツー・ディンシャン" - .

But because the name is meant to be Chinese, and because English doesn't have kanji so you can't preserve meaning either way, the translators decided it's best to use modern Chinese pronunciation. Again, some real-life immigrants also do that, use a different pronunciation of their name in China and Japan. Hell, not just CN->JP immigrants: my family is Polish, and when my brother emigrated abroad, he decided to informally go by the local variant of his name rather than his legal Polish name (think something like Krzysztof->Christopher), without changing his legal name.

JP side will likely not be confirming anything relating to the EN side. But they had to permit the localization, and they had to give the localizers reference materials. Her being Chinese had to get from somewhere, and a romanization would be easy for them to verify. As we currently stand, "Choka Shi" has never appeared as a romanization of her name officially.

JP and EN sides are just using a different pronunciation based on different linguistic and social expectations. What next, are you going to be surprised they translated instead of romanizing the name of specific Uwasa? Or that they're calling the protag of the series "Madoka Kaname" instead of "Kaname Madoka" in the English localizations? EPF (talk) 09:35, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

I think it's just best to not worry about it too much until 1. The Movie Subtitles come in, 2. The Dub comes out. Ultimately it's an English wiki and whatever the localizers choose, we'll have to respect. I also think Exedra may give us the English name earlier than the dub, which will make a whole mess because I doubt the three different groups (Exedra translation team, movie subtitlers, movie dubbers) will be in contact with each other for this process. Yay. ~ Sweet Beanie (talk) 12:39, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Pretty much. Anything right now (including my choice to stick to Choka Shi for now) is just speculation. Let's wait until the move actually comes out and then decide, paying attention to both the audio (how the name is actually pronounced in practice) and the English subtitles. ~ Celtic Minstrel (talk) 01:06, 18 August 2026 (UTC)