First off, I want to say that I understand everyone's objections here. In the end, I could go either way as long as it is a standard. Please allow me, though, to raise a few of my own objections:
Annabelle wrote:The cities of New York and Los Angeles are pronounced in a numerous ways, each language has its own way to pronounced them and yet the names remains unchanged.
In Portuguese, New York is spelled "Novo York" or 'Novo Iorque". If you were to say "New York" though, everyone would know what you were talking about. I believe the same would go for a Portuguese-speaker reading "Teledahn".
I don't know how these standards were decided upon, but it seems to me that they are
extremely biased towards English (which doesn't bother me, since the game is targeted at a mostly American audience). In English, the same letter can sometimes be pronounced many different ways independent of where it is placed in a word. If the game were based in Portuguese, however, instead of English, such a complex system would be completely unnecessary because there are strict rules that govern pronunciation. The only exception I can think of is "x", which is sometimes pronounced like an English "x" and sometimes like an "s".
I believe that what I have just said only applies to the old standard of transliteration, which was used by Cyan to transliterate words like "Teledahn". I believe that the new system would be completely bogus to use in Portuguese since it uses accents and letters like "ç" in a much different way than used in the new system.
Jutt wrote:Since most conversations are held through text chat, it's practical if everyone uses the same spelling for names.
My comment above about New York partially addresses this. Portuguese speakers would easily identify "Teledahn" and "Gahreesen" and English speakers would easily identify "Teledan" and "Garissen". I think the biggest problems might come from translated places like the Concert Hall Foyer The currently suggested translation is "Vestíbulo da Sala de Concertos". That is something that definitely needs to be translated, but I think we would agree that it turns into something very different that couldn't be understood by someone who doesn't speak Portuguese or Spanish.
As a last note, "nh" is the Portuguese equivalent to the Spanish "ñ", so "hn" might be confusing. Also, an "r" that follows a consonant sounds like a "h", so Gahreesen would sound like Gaheesen.