Romanizing ギャル
I’ve noticed different comics publishing houses romanizing the former fashion trend ギャル differently. “Gal”, “flashy gal”, and “gyaru”. “Gal” is the most accurate. It’s what many Japanese brands, magazines, and other writers use.
“Gyaru” is what I see most often in comics translated to English. I do understand that there’s a little bit of value in sticking to Hepburn and a lot of value of having a unique, easily searchable, unadmbiguous word. A lot of comics these days don’t have any kind of note or annotation for words like gyaru or otaku, trusting their readers to if they don’t know what it is, they can look it up.
But I still really bristle at “gyaru” and in general at using Hepburn for English words. Same as I how never call the Ring novel and movie “Ringu”. It feels kind of patronizing to the Japanese language and exaggerates the “Engrish” vibes as if they’re not capable of ordinary loan words and code switching like any other language.
Yes, the syllabary makes it spelled “ギャ”: “gya”, “ル”: “ru” when using katakana. That’s just how katakana works. The way to spell “gal” with katakana is “ギャル”. If you then try to “re-translate” that lossily and interpret it as “gyaru” it’s kind of a... slag? on the roundtrip capabilities of katakana.
That becomes exacerbated when some English speakers then overemphasize those roundtrip artifacts, saying “gyaaaa-RU”, “rin-GU” instead of “gal”, “ring”.
Thankfully this doesn’t extend to every word; I’m glad, for example, that omurice is never spelled “omuraisu” in English.
It might be that this is a losing battle at this point, that “gyaru” is such a stock character already in translated comics. It’s like commedia dell’arte. You have your introverts, your nerds, your flashy gals, your jocks, and you want unambiguous lexical shorthands for them.
Like all linguists I made a vow of descriptivism, not prescriptivism, when I went to school but days like these I really wanna kick myself for taking on that burdensome oath since I want to recommend translators use “gal” or “flashy gal” over “gyaru”. If I were a pure descriptivist, I’d have to say “gyaru” since that’s where the winds seems to be blowing (I haven’t actually done a corpus count, it’s just what I notice more often when reading Japanese comics translated into English). It’s much less accurate to Japanese but more accurate to choices other translators have already made and maybe there’s some value to consistency.
It still warms my heart when I see a publishing house or translator spell it “gal”. “Flashy gal” is a fun compromise, too. It’s not called that in Japanese but it’s a noun phrase that’s distinct enough to be disambiguated from just the English slang word for “girl”. But I think just “gal” is okay. Just like “punk” means both punk (generally) and punk (the 70s fashion trend) in English and care and context can disambiguate them.
Maybe “gal” can coat-tail on the path formed by writing “gyaru”? Like, a critical mass of readers have already encountered “gyaru” and the explanation “a fashion trend based on the English word ‘gal’” enough times for them to the spelling to change to “gal” and it still might work.
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