Disclaimer: I’m not learning Japanese and I don’t speak it at all, so forgive me if the question sounds dumb.
As I understand it, many Japanese given names are written in kanji and there is rarely a single way to read them – meaning that, unless they’re common, you cannot necessarily tell what a name is if you just read its kanji because there might be several ways to read it that depend on the person and/or what their parents meant when they chose the kanji.
So with that in mind, how do translators romanise Japanese names in written fiction? I understand that certain names might be common enough to be recognizable instantly, but what about the less usual ones? Wouldn’t there be an issue of consistency, e.g., a translator might interpret a name differently from another translator, or might end up not conveying what the author originally meant? Are given names in kanji always written together with their furiganas to avoid confusion?
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In Japanese script, the pronunciation of kanji can be clarified by hiragana (a syllabary script whose pronunciations are explicit by nature) written on top of beside the corresponding kanji they are marking. This is called [furigana](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). Authors understand that names are difficult even for people who are not only completely fluent, but completely literate, so they put furigana on names the first time they appear.
Unless the name is common enough, there is usually furigana at least the first time it is mentioned.