名人 is often translated into master for absolutely no logical reason whatsoever. It's long past the point of annoyance for me. But that's not even an exception, as when translating between languages with romatic words, words are translated accordin which word is most commonly used for the closest meaning, rather than acording to word roots and just saying that in taht language and culture a different word is used. Were English say settings french say parameters. I have my theories on this, essentially the habit of certain branches of academia in the social sciences to inflate the number of concepts they are dealing with . . .

I know I'm probably not a target reader of this post, but I would like an example of how you feel that it is more properly translated in context, and an example of what source you are reading from? I had to resort to google translate, which may havea worse translation withot context. (e.g. "celebrity", "personality", "personage".)

Also I have no idea what "romatic words" means, where you perhaps referring to words in "romance" languages, or something else?

But what else do you think it means? It's defined that way in the earliest Chinese references best part of 2,000 years ago. The first meaning was "a person of high reputation" (which is the literal sense: a person who has made a name for himself) but this was soon followed by a derived meaning defined (in ancient Chinese texts) as "a person who has achieved excellence in a tradition or an art" and examples cited include medicine and navigation. The term was not used in go, but variant endings such as 手 or 家 can be used, i.e. 名手 and 名家 are the same as 名人. 名家 occurs in Chinese go with the meaning of 名人 though is more generally used of painters. But 国手 was generally preferred over 名手 in China. The probable reason is that this form allowed go fans to distinguish masters of national (国) level as distinct from province masters or city masters (a distinction which survives in Japanese amateur go).

If the beef is to do with the some woke aspect of the male/female dichotomy, we might note that ladies like Joyce di Donato are perfectly happy going round the world giving what they themselves call "masterclasses."

Yes, romantic words from romance languages, whoever looked at the word 'incroyable' and thought to google translate it as 'amazing' needs a brain scan more than me! And perhaps it causes the same effect as younger generation british norther doubted the scots they were speaking was genuine simply because an an USAmerican wrote 90% of the scots wiki with his limited knowledge. This is why we need older northerners in charge of the scots wiki! European descendants in Northern Americas typically like all gealic and not southeast english UKBGNI, and one might say there are quite right, who could blame them of that opinion of quite literally the only country highschool educated USAmericans probably know exist outside of the nameless country.



If a term like that is to be translated at all, and I do question how much benefit there may be to translating every word of a distant language as that what leads to us not knowing the difference beween atsui and atsusa because someone thought loss of important nuance isn't as important as having it translated to the english word thickness, although I would say such a eurocentrolinguastic approach to a topic such as this would imply a translator mentally thicker than me, and in my my ears 'reputeworthy', 'nameworthy', 'namesake' or just 'name' would touch at the heart of what is actually communicated by East Asians who use the word, would it not be so?？ I would simply translate it as name and let people use common sense infer the obvious implied meaning as there is a coincidentally shared secondary meaning of the word name between East Asian and English, I daresay humbley . . .