[ SECRET POST #2875 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2875 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #411.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I really hate when they leave the honorifics in unless it's actually set in Japan.

I hate even more when I see complaints about taking out the honorifics.

Often the story is set in pseudo-medieval Europe and there were so many titles back then that can be used instead of inappropriate Japanese ones.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt

This. Plus, I think people overestimate how much honorifics actually add to a story. Sure, they reflect social hierarchy, but social hierarchy is not particularly difficult to figure out in English, either. I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy them if they want, but I seriously don't think you're missing much by dropping honorifics, or finding a translation that either uses English honorifics ("Mr/Ms, sir, ma'am" etc) or simply translates the dialogue in a way that reflects the relationship if it's that important to know that the grandma used -chan for the six year old.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

There are some relationships that are very directly centred on the use of/lack of honorifics though.

I've yet to find a decent English way to express e.g. how a relationship's changed subtly when you decide to drop honorifics.

[(Anonymous)]

Unfortunately with translations you'll always lose information, that's unavoidable. Unless you have something like 'Ore-sama loves his nakama very much'.

[(Anonymous)]

it bugs me so much when people keep nakama untranslated

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

True, but if that nuance is crucial to the plot -- as it would be in any romance-based manga -- then losing it means losing a big aspect of the progression of the relationship.

I'm not talking about weeaboo usage, I'm talking about a step a couple take when they choose to stop using honorifics and what it means about their relationship. If there's a concise way to address that decision in English without the need for an extra six pages of talking about their feelings then I've yet to see it.

[(Anonymous)]

Really? There's lots of ways to do it. They might involve going as far as changing the literal meaning of whole sentences of dialog, which could annoy some purists, but if the point is to show the way the characters' relationship has changed, then there's nothing wrong with it. I've seen it done before. For example, a character switching from calling the guy she was dating "Last Name-kun" to "First Name" was changed to her casually referring to him as her "boyfriend" for the first time. If it's not a name thing, you can have a character use a more informal word that they wouldn't have used around the character they're talking to, and the other character pointing it out. Etc.

[(Anonymous)]

It's really pretty simple.

Sir > Mr. Jones > Thomas > Tom > Tommy > Tommy-boy > whatever silly nickname they have between them.

There you go. And that's not even considering a situation in which there are job titles or other titles to use to show how relationships change.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, because I always start off addressing my boyfriend as Sir.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a good chance you wouldn't have met him as a -sama in Japanese, either.

[aboutelle]

I barely know anything about Japanese, but I do think that if you leave something out of a translation you always lose a layer of the medium.

German for example has formal and informal pronouns and you pretty much always have to choose one or the other (ask any German about how difficult it is to avoid using them when you're not sure which one is appropriate), when speaking German you're steeped in this commentary on the relationship between the people talking to each other. So when translating something to German the choice of pronouns is extremely important. There have been numerous debates among German fans about the use of the formal "Sie" in Sherlock for example. And if your language doesn't have that distinction it's very difficult to grasp just how important this seemingly little thing is.

On the other side of that coin translations into German often simply drop the characters accents and have everyone speak standard German. That means we lose that layer of characterization which I've never thought was important until I started watching shows in the original English.

Tl;dr: I don't think you can accurately judge how important an aspect of another language is unless you're familiar with that language beyond knowing vocabulary.

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes, accents/dialects that might be similar to the ones in the original series might be added, though, such as the Northern German dialect in How to Train Your Dragon. But that's not always an option because "things that are similar to this particular cultural matter of saying this" often doesn't exist.

And then you have those morons who think "Oh, this is a Japanese animation, we must pronounce all names faux-Japanese, fuck research and the fact that this is an English name" like they did in the German dub of Howl's Moving Castle.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man, they do this in a lot of RPGs, where suddenly everyone is magically "Ihr". It just really throws me when this address is off.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with this. I was pleasantly surprised when I read Yen Press' "Zombie Loan" releases and they kept the honorific. It was the first official release I had ever read that had done then and I thought it was a nice touch.

But them having Vincent call Gil 'Nii-san' in "Pandora Hearts" just seemed out of place to me since these characters weren't Japanese. There it just seemed gratuitous.

[(Anonymous)]

To me, it doesn't depend so much on whether the characters are Japanese as whether they're written as if they were.

Rorona's Atelier clearly contains no Japanese characters, and yet the relationship between Sterkenburg and Esty is so markedly kohai/senpai that the entire translation of their interactions winds up being a bit cringe inducing.

Of course, basically most of the translation of Rorona is kind of cringe inducing, so I guess that's par for the course.