Why are equal signs used to substitute an English hyphen?

Question

I was reading an article about Idlib and the groups that were there on Wikipedia, and hovered to the language setting to gloss at the title translations. For Japanese, I saw something unusual in its format. For example, the rendering of the name of one of those groups is 「タハリール・アル＝シャーム」instead of the usual 「タハリール・アル・シャーム」. I also saw this in manga character names such as「キルシュ＝ワイミー」. Is using the equals sign in place of nakaguro common and is it acceptable? If so, is it solely at the author's discretion?

Answer 1

What a great discovery! Thank you for your close attention to our language!

I picked up several Japanese magazines and books around me, looking for more similar examples. Since they are all Japanese, they are basically written vertically, from right to left. However as you pointed out, I was able to find one proof: 小川勝＝文. As you can see, the first (left) part is a name of an individual. And then, you notice an equal sign followed by the letter 文, meaning a sentence, but in this case, it says: Masaru Ogawa (小川勝) is the author of this writing/article.

I think the equal sign can be used in lieu of hyphen as you observe, but as far as I know, there is not a concrete rule of its usage.