Names and Cultural Appropriation

I've been doing a lot of world building, and I'm worried that I've hit a bit of a moral wall. The situation goes like this:

• In the past, I used Google Translate to come up with cool sounding names.
• I picked a language that sounded decidedly non English, and then type words like 'forest' or 'fire' or 'star hope.'
• I looked at the translation, maybe modified it a bit to sound better to my ear, and capitalized the first letter.
• I wrote the name at the top of a character or NPC sheet.

Easy, right? A quick way to get an interesting sounding name. A way that doesn't require me to slam my head against a wall trying to come up with something interesting on the spot. But Google Translate can sometimes take a long time. I might type a word in, decide I don't like it, type another word in, and go through the cycle six or seven times before I find something I like. Or I might see something I like, but have to spend a minute deciding on the best way to alter it.

So the easier answer is name lists. Everyone loves name lists. And if, for example, I'm already translating names into something like Bengali, I might as well just grab a name list of Bengali names.

But this is where I start worrying about cultural appropriation. For anyone that doesn't know, cultural appropriation is:

"...a concept dealing with the adoption of the elements of a minority culture by members of the dominant culture. Cultural elements which may have deep meaning to the original culture may be reduced to 'exotic' fashion or toys by those from the dominant culture."

So... what does that mean for names? I mean, I am a member of a dominant culture. I'm white, I live in a culture which is probably the most dominant, with the most privileges. And if I'm honest with myself, when I'm coming up with names from google translate or using name lists from other languages, I'm not often using those names for humans. Most of the time they are for Elves, or Living Spells, or Tabaxi. In fact, the thing that made me worry about this was looking at a Bengali name that meant "Lord Shiva."

That's a god, and I don't mean in the D&D sense of the word. Shiva is a real world deity with cultural importance for a whole mass of people. It's just not my culture, so it sounds like a name that would fit perfect with my kitty cat people who live in the desert.

That's almost exactly the definition of cultural appropriation.

When I was only running games for myself and other people, in the comfort of my own home, or even in roll20, it wasn't such a big deal. But now I'm designing stuff with the hopes that people other than me and my group will look at it. That they will like it. Eventually, that they will like it enough to buy it. That makes the homebrew that I design public, which changes the amount of responsibility that I have to be a good person and represent myself in ways that I want to have a reputation for. It means not casually appropriating a culture and hand waving the problem away with a thought like, well, it's not like anyone is going to make a fuss about it... most people won't even think about it.

But I've thought about it. And it's not a genie I can just stuff back into the bottle.

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Citation:

Wikipedia. "Cultural Appropriation," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation