Board Thread:Wiki Discussions and Support/@comment-17623-20141120175501/@comment-790798-20141124093928

Sarada or サラダ is a phoenetic spelling, as are the Naruto characters Asura アシュラ and Indra インドラ. The fact that it's synonymous with the Japanese spelling of Salad means nothing. After all, until the introduction of kana, the proper kanji writings for the asuras and Indra were 阿修羅 and 因陀羅... Given, インドラ is commonly used today instead of 因陀羅... but 阿修羅 is used instead of the phoenetic アシュラ, likely due to Buddhist use of the asuras as simply, well, asuras, whilst Indra mostly only appears in Hinduism under that name, with Japanese Buddhism referring to Indra as 帝釈天, or Taishakuten.

Unless Kishimoto comes out and says the romanization should be Salad/Salade, Sarada just makes more sense. There's no precedence in Naruto for characters named after food loanwords, however, there is precedence for Hindi influence.

Yeah there ARE characters named after food, Anko for instance, but these characters have purely Japanese names, not names that are English loanwords. The only characters to use loanword names are Might Guy, Rock Lee, Pain, and of course the various alphabet Kumo nin, none of which sound all too horribly silly as Salad does.

But hey maybe there's some lost in translation stuff going on- Japanese clothing designers have been known to use pretty strange English terms on their clothing to look cool. Still, that's more of a jump in logic than Sarada being Sarada, imo.