Actually Yanyi is a combination of "act" and "meaning", and most closely means "to explain" which even CHBT knew, but are you really going to tell me that "An Explanation of the Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms" gets the message across to English readers as much as "Romance" (which would imply that it's not an accurate portrayal of history, which is a connotation you get from the original Chinese that doesn't translate 1-1).
CHBT used very outdated and awful romanizations to be sure but unless you read the book in Chinese I'm not sure how you could "not use the inaccurate translations", which doesn't really do a lick of help when trying to get other English speakers to appreciate this wonderful and mandatory reading.