I bought a second hand CD single of 'Reflection' which is the closing song of Slayers Great anime. Sometimes the first editions of CD singles come with a little extra something. I think these are called 'omake' (お負け). Anyway, to get to the point, this CD came with a business card for the lead character from the anime. It said
天才美少女魔道士
リナ＝インバース
There's a lot of kanji and no kana in that first line, but the first 5 kanji are pretty easy.
天才美少女 = tensai bishoujo = genius beautiful young woman
(Actually I think 'gifted' works better than 'genius' in this case)
The next 3 kanji are harder. 魔 = 'ma' (demon), 道 = 'dou' (way of doing,path,road), 士 = 'shi' (samurai, warrior). So this is 'demon way of doing warrior'. I.e. a sorcerer who performs magic through the use of demons (or maybe using the same methods as demons). I have heard this word occasionally in anime (it comes up quite often in 'Louie the Rune Soldier'), although more often the english word sorcerer is used.
Incidentally 魔道 = 'madou' = evil path. I've spotted this as a subtitle (as in xxx of the evil path) on the film Ashura and will go back sometime to see if this is 'madou' in the japanese
Also interesting is that 道士 = 'doushi' = taoist. (
Wikipedia). This all gives a flavour of what the overall word 魔道士 actually means.
Anyway, to get back on track, that means:
天才美少女魔道士 = gifted beautiful young woman sorcerer
And then we get to the name, which being in katakana, is easy;
リナ＝インバース = rina inba-su = Lina Inverse.
The '＝' symbol appears to be a separator, like a space, although I haven't seen it used anywhere else yet (Keeping eyes peeled though).
So the whole thing translates:
天才美少女魔道士
リナ＝インバース
Gifted beautiful young woman sorcerer
Lina Inverse
Not quite suitable for use on my business card (名刺)
