surname translations

Just out of interest I was wondering how people went through the process of surname translations and if many people had any trouble doing this one marrying in Japan and registering your marriage at the city hall.

The reason I am asking and I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence neither is that I am sure you are aware that certain words are spoken differently let alone the difference between English and the Japanese alphabet. I know katakana is their best way to translate and pronounce foreign words however this can be still ambiguous and I can only imagine I slight nightmare for some. This therefore can not be avoided perhaps and certain wording mistakes.

I'd be interested to see your experiences on this and appreciative

You mean "transliteration" or "Japanese kana writing" as against "translation" :)

I (Japanese) and my spouse (EU national) got married in another country, and registered that marriage with the Japanese authorities at a later date.

When we did that, we needed to provide a Japanese translation of the whole marriage certificate, which I myself did. At that time, I wrote my husband's name in katakana as it should be, as pronounced (there is a part which people cannot correctly pronounce, just looking at the alphabet writing), and so that was how it was recorded into my family register.

Also, that katakana writing is the way he registered his name as "alias" on his Alien Registration (now New Resident system, I don't know how they handle alias in that newer system), so he does have an official katakana transliteration version of his name.

Okay. Translating your name from English into japanese. Required for certain docs seems like it's not necessarily straight forward on a pronunciation side. Should it be done as it is spelt it pronounced. There could be a few possible ways to pronounce it thus does it matter which one as long as it slightly matches the English version?