[Vanya]

Thanks in advance!

What's the exact literal translation for this:
竜騎士

This is what I interpret this as.
竜 - ryuu: dragon
騎 - ki: counter for horseman
士 - shi: practitioner; warrior

So... Dragon Rider?

PS- I know the convention is Dragoon, but I don't care about that.

[Hiei-]

You have to read it like that :

竜 (ryuu) + 騎士 (kishi)
竜 (ryuu) = Dragon
騎士 (kishi) = Knight

So 竜騎士 (ryuu kishi) = Dragon Knight.

[Vanya]

So why kishi, and not senshi? Seems like kishi would be closer in meaning to cavalier than knight.

[LostTemplar]

戦士 senshi is a more general term. It basically translates to "warrior". 騎士 kishi is more specifically a mounted warrior. It is also used to refer to the European knight in general (the rank), because the term knight originally was related to horsemanship as well.

[Vanya]

Cool. Thanks.

[Hiei-]

Yup, for me "Senshi" is "Soldier" or "Warrior", not "Knight".

[tashi]

To keep beating a dead horse, in the PSP game 絶体絶命都市３， one of the lines has the word 騎士 in it, and the voice actor actually says ナイト knight.

[geishaboy]

To keep beating a dead horse, in the PSP game 絶体絶命都市３， one of the lines has the word 騎士 in it, and the voice actor actually says ナイト knight.

This kind of thing happens quite a lot in various forms of media, particularly novels and manga. In this case the character is obviously saying knight, and the kanji is used to define what kind of knight he is talking about.

[Ryusui]

Yu-Gi-Oh!'s big on it, too. The kanji say 超銀河眼の光子龍, but the furigana read ネオ・ギャラクシーアイズ・フォトン・ドラゴン. Just to cite one fairly recent example.

[LostTemplar]

Sometimes they even set kanjis as furi"gana". I think it's pretty cool, it isn't something you can do as easily/elegant in other writing systems.

[geishaboy]

Yu-Gi-Oh!'s big on it, too. The kanji say 超銀河眼の光子龍, but the furigana read ネオ・ギャラクシーアイズ・フォトン・ドラゴン. Just to cite one fairly recent example.

You would not believe how many Yugioh card titles I have had to translate in the past couple of months. Fuck Yugioh and all it stands for.

Even if I enjoyed the first few volumes of the Yugioh manga

Fuck Yugioh and all it's cards, it used to be about punishing evil!

[Ryusui]

Still is. ZEXAL's villain-du-jour, Tron, is up to some really twisted stuff. He mind raped one of his opponents because she was associated with the son of his sworn enemy. His story, basically, is that he and the main character's father were betrayed and "sacrificed" to an alternate dimension by the guy he's currently trying to get revenge on; the experience warped him both mentally and physically, but it doesn't exactly make him any more sympathetic, given that he looks like a masked ten-year-old whose face is almost always twisted into a psychotic smile. He's like Pegasus Crawford by way of Higurashi. >_>

For the record, I don't actually watch the show - I just keep up with the synopses. ^_^; God help me, I freakin' love the new Xyz monsters and the Numbers. Some of the stuff they've done with the card translations recently has been pretty clever, too, though there's still the occasional glitch.