[ SECRET POST #4887 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4887 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 61 secrets from Secret Submission Post #700.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[type_wild]

1. I hate, hate, HATE it when people write Hercule Poirot dialogue

2. Depending on canon and which version of it I came here from, I'll leave the honorifics in fic. It SAYS something that Banba calls him "Lin-chan" instead of just "Lin", and it's a distinction that can't really be replicated in English, at least not without a lot of tedious workarounds and awkwardness. I 100% think honorifics should be let out of dubs and professional translations, but in fic, there's a good chance your readers will have heard the same speech patterns and honorifics in use already.

[(Anonymous)]

This 100%. There's also the fact that in written text it doesn't look as awkward or clumsy or out of place as hearing someone butcher the pronunciation in a dub. But I think it's fine for written work like fanfic, especially since fanfic focuses so much on the relationships between characters and honorifics and such create a lot of context for those relationships.

[type_wild]

Exactly. I went over to my manga collection just to see how prevalent the honorifics usage was anyway (seems like Tokyopop did it but no-one else, so...), and it struck me that wow, there would been something almost tangible lost from Tokyo Babylon if they hadn't made the distinction between "Seishirou-san" and "Sei-chan". I'm very certain I'd prefer to LISTEN to the weirdass "Mr. Seishirou", but writing lets you imagine what the characters sound like. Honorifics doesn't detract from that, at least not to a reader who has watched enough anime to know how they carry IRL.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a couple other cases of official translations using honorifics that I think are kind of interesting!

One is Fantagraphics' Wandering Son - in the translation notes, translator Rachel Thorn goes into how she'd been translating manga for something like 20 years without retaining honorifics unless the editor absolutely insisted, but decided the central gender/transgender themes of WS would lose a lot of nuance by stripping them out entirely. So the notes function both as a way to explain the decision-making of what's been kept and what hasn't, and as a guide to understanding them.

Viz, which also seemed to usually remove honorifics, placed them back in in their reprint of Maison Ikkoku. I did wonder if that was more of a "this is what readers want now" move, since they also "untranslated" "flunk-out" back to "ronin". But it also smoothed out some of the formality level issues - for instance, at some point a character named Kyoko hears her tenant calling for a cat, "Kyoko-chan", and thinks she's being called. She's slightly puzzled and says that he shouldn't call her that, which seems reasonable. The original translation in comparison feels like a weird underreaction, because they have him yelling "Kyoko baby!".

[type_wild]

Funny thing is, Maison Ikkoku was one I considered mentioning because the version I have is the one with "Kyoko" and "Yusaku" rather than "Kanrinrin-san" and "Godai". I didn't even realise that the level of familiarity was A Thing until I watched a bit of the anime. (And oh, I remember when the shoe dropped on the "Kyoko baby" thing, because it was so. akward)

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt - I was curious to see if there was any other commentary on this switch online and found an interview with the original translator, before the reprints - and he absolutely agreed it was super-awkward, they had no idea how else to get around it at the time, and he bemoaned likely being stuck with it forever(!).

http://www.furinkan.com/features/interviews/jones2.html

[(Anonymous)]

Kodansha tends to use the honorifics too, from what I've seen. Another CLAMP example, actually -- in Tsubasa Chronicle the difference between Sakura calling Syaoran by just his name versus using 'Syaoran-kun' is an actual plot point and I can't really think of any decent way they could've conveyed that in English without using the honorific.