This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

I say we need to stay vigilant here. Gaddafi with a G may be gone, but we still have not captured Qadaffi, Kaddafi, Gathafi, and Chanukkah.

— Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, on Muammar Gaddafi's capture and death

This trope describes characters whose names are almost never spelled consistently, usually because of transliteration issues. This tends to happen in Anime and Japanese video games that haven't been officially translated into English, although it also crops up in other languages that don't use the Latin alphabet. Situations include anything from drama between vowel additions to unique-cipher dropping, due to phoneme sets and writing systems. English, for example, is famous for many ways and rules of spelling (e.g., Americans generally dropping extra vowels such as in the word color, as compared with its British spelling colour), despite having far fewer actual sounds they represent. Japanese has separate vowel-heavy syllabic and ideographic writing systems; since the latter overlaps with Chinese, sometimes there is a question of whether a name should be transliterated from the Japanese or the Chinese reading. Spanish has several familiar looking letter combinations intended to be pronounced in specific ways. Complicating the issue is that some names simply become popular enough in other languages that they're modified to fit them better, and you can't be sure if it's actually intended to be meaningful. Another complication is when the name is only ever shown in modified form, meaning we simply have to guess.

Assuming an official release settles the issue, some fans deliberately use one of the alternate spellings to establish their "credibility" as fans. In true fan fashion, this often persists even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as Theme Naming, Meaningful Names, Prophetic Names, and direct proclamations by the work's creator. Eventually, this stops being cool and just starts making people angry, and the self-righteous morons have brought up a Fandom-Enraging Misconception.

In some cases, official translated versions will adopt bizarre transliterations for the sake of Writing Around Trademarks and/or establishing new ones — because, when a Cash-Cow Franchise gets imported, it's more useful to have character names that can be trademarked for the sake of selling licensed merchandise.

This trope is omnipresent with Greek. The convention in English is not to transliterate, but instead to Latinize, Greek nouns and names. Hence nigh unpronounceable Latinizations like "Cynoscephalae" instead of "Kynoskefali" for Greek Κυνὸςκεφαλαη, "dog's head".

This can also occur in translations of ancient texts written in outdated forms of modern scripts. For example, early Latin had no "J", but, as English has no consonantal "I", "J" is often used to signify such (notwithstanding that Y is actually the closest equivalent to a consonantal I in English). To a lesser extent, this can occur when transliterating words that contain a thorn (þ), which is already well represented by "TH". In point of fact, it can even be seen in many English texts from before standardized spelling (yes, there was such a time), won ecksampel beeing þis frais. And anoþre beeing þis sentans. Þis won heer is a partickularlie gud ecksampel.

The trope's name comes from an Isaac Asimov short story, "Spell My Name With An S," in which a pair of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens use The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday to stop The End of the World as We Know It—by persuading an obscure scientist to change one letter of his name from Z to S, and watching Hilarity Ensue (until they realize that The Watcher will know that there was supposed to be an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, and so are forced to come up with an equally subtle Reset Button). Asimov was inspired to write the story after having his name misspelled — Azimov, or even Asenion once — one time too many. Incidentally, Isaac Asimov's original name in the Cyrillic alphabet was "Исаак Азимов" (Isaak Azimov, with the initial "I" pronounced like "ee") and pronounced quite differently from how the American public and he himself pronounced it during his lifetime. Now in Russia, translations of his works use the spelling of "Айзек Азимов" Aizek Azimov) to better convey the American English phonetics, out of respect for the author.

While it may apply to some folders this trope shows up on, this page MAY NOT include minor differences in romanization systems, such as the various methods of indicating long vowels in Japanese, or the use of the apostrophe to indicate syllabic nasals. VERY FEW EXAMPLES WILL BE MENTIONED AS THERE ARE TOO MANY TO LIST.

Contrast My Nayme Is, which is the intentional misspelling of one's name.

The opposite of Viewer Pronunciation Confusion, which is when the spelling/writing of the name is unequivocal but people can't agree on how it's supposed to sound. The tlopes can ovelrap, howevel, if a celtain sound does not exist in a a palticural ranguage.

May lead to a Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?.

Related to Adaptation Dye-Job (and/or other Adaptation Tropes, as the case may be). Compare with Rouge Angles of Satin, when a word or name is spelled incorrectly in a way that it is confused with another existent word, Viewer Name Confusion for when the name is spelt consistently but the viewers get it wrong, and The "The" Title Confusion, when there is confusion over whether a work title begins with "the".

Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Myth and Religion
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation

Other examples: