Quote Originally Posted by The Man View Post
<div style="font: 16px Candara, Skia, Corbel, 'Trebuchet MS', Georgia, Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida, 'Lucida Grande', Arial, sans-serif; color: #38bcee; text-align: justify;">Sorry for bumping an old thrad, but I wasn't around and this deserves a response. Yes, I am aware. Lydia and Rydia are phonetically the same in Japanese and it seems extremely likely the people who actually named her meant to name her Lydia, as that is an actual name. However, the people who translated the game were not aware of this, because they did not actually know anything about English or any other language that wasn't Japanese (hence Barbariccia, Cagnazzo, Scarmiglione, etc. being rendered as Valvalis, Kainazzo, Milon, etc.). It is quite likely that the misspelling has simply stuck for exactly the same reason that the spelling Kain has stuck even though his name is clearly intended to be a Biblical reference: the misspelling is simply too well known to bother changing.</div>
There seems to be a bit more to it than that. Aeris was changed to Aerith in consequent games after it was established that the name was meant to be Aerith all along. I think that the character designers tend to favor one transliteration of a name over another and adjust the character names in subsequent titles if they didn't like how it turned out. For example, contrast Aeris becoming Aerith to Rydia remaining Rydia in every single recent release of the game.