Seeing as we're already off-topic... I think the Persian example is a little different - it's exotic for the Japanese player as well, so you're just keeping that exoticness intact. There does seem to be a certain school of thought that Japanese players can handle exotic names and Westerners can't, though. For example, I was once told to change the names of some monsters named after Chinese mythical creatures because they wouldn't be familiar to Western players. Honestly, they probably wouldn't have been familiar to uneducated Japanese players, either - what's wrong with learning something new?
I wouldn't say I'd never translate strigoi as vampire, or houou as phoenix - there's a time and a place for doing so. I'm not advocating translating a throwaway line as "He rose up like a houou", or calling a vampire character in a Romanian platformer aimed at children "Li'l Strigoi". But in the example given, and a story set in ancient Japan, I probably wouldn't. Apart from ruining the atmosphere, you're also setting yourself up to have to change more and more stuff each time something strigoi-specific comes up that doesn't make sense anymore because you've called the thing a vampire.
Hoou-hen is the way to read these Kanjis for the Japaneses. Why take the same reading to translate the name of a bird from a Chinese myth?
Just because it's set in Japan, and that's how the characters would presumably refer to it. Either way could work, though. It would probably depend on the details of the story, which I can't remember.
I think the game has nothing to do with the animals called gophers, so impossible to say Konami's choice is wrong, they have just invented a new word for the game, and it's the right of artists (coders are also artists).
