I was watching some anime (as you do) and the title contained the word 城内 (inside of a castle), which is typically pronounced じょうない which I needed to look up since I am just a beginner. However, when the title is read out, it is spoken by the narrator as シャトー with that same furigana above the kanji. It caught my eye, because i didn’t expect to see katakana in the furigana.
Is it common to have a kanji word with a Japanese pronunciation that is just read out as a loan word instead? Are there any common instances of this with other readings?
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It is common, ive at least seen this a lot in light novels and manga…where you use katakana for furigana….i didnt research why specifically, but i did notice that every time it did it it would not be how the kanji is typically read…it would typically be another word, a synonym of what the actual word and reading would be
EDIT
For example, Im reading the manga 東京喰種(とうきょうぐーる) and they said at some point this word
単独犯 which is pronounced as たんどくはん….but as furigana they had other words….全部あたし ….in this part of the manga, the speaker was basically saying that she was “the sole culprit”….and in furigana it said “it was all me”(who did it)….
Hopefully this helps
This is a device seen mostly in fiction (particularly anime/manga/LNs etc). I guess certain genres of advertisement might also lean on it.
It’s almost reverse furigana: the author wants to use a word like シャトー, because loanwords look cool or because the story is set in Generic Fake Europe. Because the loanword might be unfamiliar to their target audience (or in some cases, be made up entirely), the kanji is there to explain the meaning.
Some loan words do have official kanji. One you still might see around occasionally is 珈琲 for コーヒー, usually by people trying to invoke a retro feel. Others, like 亜米利加、英吉利 which are sound based kanji spellings for アメリカ、イギリス, are where we get 米、英 as shorthand for those countries (hence 英語).
In other contexts you might see something like an explanatory brackets instead, e.g. ＮＡＳＡ（アメリカ航空宇宙局)
I know [they did it in One Piece](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/onepiece/images/4/4f/Episode_158.png)
They call Enel a god, written with 神 but having ゴッド as the pronounciation
It’s extremely common in fantasy and scifi. When reading Philip Dick’s Ubik I would often see the kanji + the katakana reading of the English word.
In such cases the kanji is used to explain the meaning to Japanese viewers/readers.