Internet sleuths have deemed it to be a corruption of “Golubaeser”, i.e. from “Golubaes”, itself something of a bad transliteration or transcription job dating back to the Age of Intractable and/or Non-Existent Transliteration; at any rate, the place is still called Golubac to this day (where the ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ts’). You can find old literature also refer to it as “Golubacz” under the convention that also gives us the spelling “czar” (the ‘aes’ spelling quite possibly came about from some editor seeing this spelling and thinking he knew better), “Golubaz” under the convention of “German uses those for ‘ts’ sounds, right?”, and most probably some other variants. Assuming this is correct, it refers to a nasty (perhaps mythical) sort of insect, the research of which I shall leave to those better versed in mythology and the languages of that region.
So, uh, I guess there’s no
really right answer since everything is based on layers of mistakes, but I’ve seen at least one bit of official merch strongly implying that ‘Golbeza’ is the intended romanization (track listing of Piano Collections Final Fantasy IV). I suppose you would see it in a copy of the easy sheet music (DOREMI Music Publishing) if you had it; that’s an easy place to find several other intended romanizations for some old games (I believe it’s because these piano books were done before
actual translations were ever considered—not all of them provide English/Engrish titles, though). Too bad I’ve never gotten my mitts on a copy
