Quote:
Originally Posted by zorahk
Of course it will be, and actually it is very common for things like this to be used as ateji rather than reading them for real because word like 夜想曲 sound very old fashioned where as ノクターン does not.
the kanji is really just there for stylization and meaning clarification, not because we want to pronounce it like that. It's too old-school. We still write shanghai as 上海 but that doesn't mean we pronounce it Joukai or something stupid japan-ified like that, we still say shanghai. (bad example but you still get the point)
do you write アメリカ as 亜米利加 or フランス as 仏蘭西？ yeah I didn't think so.
There are lots of semi-old fashioned words that exist because of the boom of 外来語 when Japan opened up during the meiji restoration.
Most of these words exist as literal translations of western words that were then converted into kanji. 夜想曲 is one of these 外来語
Some of them are quite a mouthful, and trying to figure out how to translate words like 系譜尊敬主義 (which makes perfect sense as a word in Japanese but none in english) is quite a daunting task, and not something I like to do every day.
many gairaigo are now used kind of along side their katakana equivalents though. So some harder to understand gairaigo are now being replaced.
-native english/japanese speaker, translation specialist.
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I've read plenty of raw manga and whatnot to get all that.