#cause people use vnc so often but ‘carte’ just DOES NOT look like ‘カルテ/karute’ to me

[applestorms]

i am once again getting confused by the various titles/romanizations for [ mochijun’s second main series w/ the vampires & vanitas ]. with the help of this thread & my own minimal knowledge of japanese + some googling, here’s what i’ve come up with:

ヴァニタスの手記 (カルテ) : original japanese title. directly, this would be “vanitasu no karute,” though the kanji for karute (meaning patient’s chart/clinical records/or here maybe doctor’s notes, in japanese) can also be read as shuki (meaning memo).

the case study of vanitas: from what i can tell, the main english translation title, used on the covers of the english manga + anime. plays into the doctor side of things with the “case study” bit.

les mémoires de vanitas: main french translation title. pretty straightforward, “the memoirs of vanitas”.

all good so far, but then here’s the bit that’s weird to me:

vanitas no carte: from what i can tell, an attempt at romanizing the original japanese title? bit weird to me since while “carte” *is* a french word (meaning map/card/menu?? do correct me if you know more french here) it’s not quite the same as karute (or shuki) in terms of meaning, even if the pronunciation is similar enough if you squint (and ignore the silent “e” in the original french).

vanitas no karte: even weirder as a romanization option. “karte” is a german word that from what i can tell means card/postcard, seemingly closer to the french “carte” than the japanese “karute,” even though i did see a claim in that thread that karute might’ve been taken from the german originally?? (and it is spelled with katakana in the original, typical for when japanese takes foreign words.)

in both vanitas no carte / karte japanese grammar is still clearly being used though, with the “の/no” possessive particle. it’s also used that way in this next one:

vanitas no shuki: clearly just a romanization of the original japanese, but using the kanji reading of “手記” > the listed “カルテ” reading.

—so i assume most english readers around here have been treating the carte/karte/shuki titles as romanized titles.

to be clear, this is not to say that any of these titles are wrong or that people are wrong for using any of these, i just find this to be a particularly interesting case for how words translate across multiple languages. the one question i still have (for any native/fluent japanese speakers out there, maybe?) is if there’s any more context for カルテ as a word. is it actually seen as a loan word, from the french/german? was it originally a loan word that’s so imbued in the language by now that some people don’t recognize it as a loan (e.g. cafe or kindergarten in english)? something else?