So I translated the pixiv name of the artist as Dr Skinny but I saw the artist is already posted here previously under the romanised Gargari (full name Garigari hakase translates to literally as Skinny Dr.)

Why would we need translated versions of usernames?

Alright, done. dr_skinny and ガリガリ博士 are now both aliased to --> garigari .

For future reference: we generally go with the romanised transliteration of their name instead of translating it. To explain why, it helps to know that even English names like Andrew can be translated and actually means "manly/man/warrior". But people don't call people named Andrew 'warrior' instead, because it's a name. So instead being translated, it's just spelled out as is. When something is in a different alphabet, like hiragana for example, then we will transliterate it [romanize it] into our alphabet to make it accessible, but we still don't translate it. And in case it's helpful, this http://www.romajidesu.com/translator/ seems to be pretty good for finding what the transliteration would be and is a little more reliable then some of the other sites. (On that note, http://romaji.me/ is a common site for this, probably because it shows up high on google searches, but tends to leave things out and do an overly simplified/incomplete job of transliterating stuff I've noticed in practice, so I don't recommend that one. And googletranslate only translates, doesn't offer transliteration that I know of). So that's why I use that first one when I have to doublecheck ones before I can approve them.

Also, for future reference, when suggesting something for alias or implication, it's best to use https://e621.net/tag_alias/new to suggest an alias and https://e621.net/tag_implication/new to suggest an implication. Doing it that way will automatically generate a forum thread with the reason given, but it will also creates a pending entry for it in this section which makes it easier to keep track of it for the admins. Creating the thread manually doesn't add it to the pending list. Though don't feel bad about that, the first few times I suggested an alias or implication when I was a member, I made them manually too. I just hadn't discovered that other page yet, and it's not easy to find.

So, just a few non-obvious things that are helpful to know for future reference.

I will stick to the romanised from now on. It was just that I had been used to using the translated versions and had seen a few artists whose listings here are under the translated as opposed to romanised versions of their names.

Pasiphaë said:
I will stick to the romanised from now on. It was just that I had been used to using the translated versions and had seen a few artists whose listings here are under the translated as opposed to romanised versions of their names.

Yeah, how to tag pixiv artists has always been a challenge. And this site has tried a lot of different options over the years, most people having to guess on how exactly to tag them. It's been fairly recent that we've been getting a more standardised policy about it, so a lot of the older tags are all over the place. And sometimes the tag we have was copied from another image board which may have a completely different policy on them.

Currently we prefer this:
1, best option is if the artist already has a romanized username somewhere (like their furaffinity username, blog username, twitter username, etc) then we use that. And then alias the other main forms and usernames they have to it. That way all their art goes to the same place, we're not inventing a name for them, and the usernames people are likely to try to tag them by will autocorrect to the single tag we're using for them.
2, if they don't have any other accounts listed in obvious places, then we'll transliterate their hiragana/katakana/kanji/etc to make the tag (and alias the hiragana/etc form to it). So that way people can copypaste what they see on their pixiv page as the name, and our site will switch it to be the transliterated version that's been set up as the tag. Making it easy to tag artists for users which can't read non-latin alphabets.

Eventually most of the older, borrowed, and duplicate pixiv artist tags will get standardized. Probably over time and on a case-by-case basis.

You could also just go and ask them if they have an English alias. It's a surprisingly equalibriated question, meaning that if you translate it back and forth, it doesn't change.

Equalibrium test