The Confusion of Name Order

Ever been watching a show in a foriegn language, and you hear the characters say "Doe John," but you see the subtitles say "John Doe?" Yep - they're switching the name order. But then it gets even worse when the next scene they say "Jane Doe", and the subtitles say not "Doe Jane..." but they keep it as "Jane Doe." Wait a second, what is going on here? This type of confusion can lead to people trying to figure out which is a character's first name and which is their last name, and everything gets confusing, and you're just like "what the heck is going on here?!" Welcome to the wacky, confusing world of name order.

What is name order?

Name order is the order you write your name in. Sounds simple enough, right? Nope. In Western countries, the format "First Last." However, there's also Eastern name order - "Last First" - which is used in countries like China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan. And you'll notice that often, subtitles and dubs will switch around the name order... sometimes. And it can just be so annoying!

First and Last, Last First

In Japan, name order is commonly written as "Last First," with the exception of Western names sometimes. In addition, your family name is also commonly used to refer to someone. When one of these name's are dropped, the first name is usually the one to go. Still don't get it? Let's say we have an anime, and we have our protagonist. His first name is "Haruki" and his last name is "Tanaka." In the US (or other Western countries), we'd normally write this as "Haruki Tanaka," right? However, if you wanted to say that Haruki was cool in Japanese, the name order would be formatted more like this:

田中ハルキさんはかっこいだろう！
Tanaka Haruki-san is cool, isn't he!

And my subtitles preserve this name order. And you might think, "well, this is easy - the first name is the last name and the last name is the first name!" And if you thought that, well, no, that's not exactly correct. Because in Japanese, they often preserve Western name order when transliterating English names!

バラック・オバマ様はアメリカの44プレジデントです。
Barrack Obama-sama is the American 44th president.

This is what makes name order really confusing. So how do you tell what the character's first name is? Well, the real question is, do you even need to? If I was talking about Gojo to my friend, I could also refer to him as "Satoru."

Oh, remember when Satoru did that funny thing in Episode XYZ?

There are a few instances when you would actually need to know their first name to be able to refer to them, but in those contexts, it's obvious what their first name is. And that context is with siblings. If I wanted to refer to Tanjiro, I could call him Kamodo, but that might be confusing. Who am I talking about, Tanjiro, or Nezuko? In this case, you'll probably see somewhere in the subtitles that they're siblings. So even if the name orders were written as "Kamodo Tanjiro" and "Nezuko Kamodo," based on the fact that they're siblings, you could probably guess which one is their last name.

Let's Preserve Name Order!

Let's start preserving name order, no matter how it was originally written. Name order is one of those things that can't just be fixed by swapping the words in the subtitles, and honestly, I wish more official subtitles would preserve the original name order.