May we get light novel translations with honorifics

[Travis Butler]

@bartzbb said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I don't mind if the honorifics are removed as long as the setting is not based on Japanese culture.

If the setting is in a medieval fantasy then it's fine if they are removed but if in that medieval setting there is a country or culture that is based from Japan then I expect that the people there would use honorifics and it would only be exclusive to that place.

But if the story uses a Japanese setting I would prefer to keep the honorifics as is. Even if the setting also has some sci-fi and supernatural elements.

To me, it's all about how smoothly it reads; I don't really care about Japan vs non-Japan setting. If an honorific can be replaced smoothly, I don't mind, no matter where it's set; if it's expressing a distinction that requires awkward phrasing to reproduce, then I don't like it being translated.

I expect the latter case would be more common in Japanese settings, but some of the worst translation hiccups I've encountered have been in fantasy settings.

[Rahul Balaggan]

I am going to reiterate my point from earlier.

As this is a topic for a feature suggestion any further comments in this topic should be in regards to the feature request itself.

Any further comments related directly to the use of honorifics will be moved.

Thank you for your cooperation.

[TAAPAye]

@kevin-s
Thank you for your perspective. I have no notion to the difficulty of translating so it is good to know that always asking both forms to be encoded may be too much.

I am encouraged to hear that the general idea itself didn't get strong objection.

So let me propose another way of doing it that hopefully would be less of a burden. Let me ignore your case of switching from a proper name to "you" for a second. Assuming there is a many-to-one mapping from the English version to the Japanese honorific, we may be able to completely automate the process. Like find "special" words like Mrs./Mr. or Teacher/Master/Dr. followed by some set of proper nouns and translate them to some set of proper nouns + "-san" or "-sensei" respectively. This way there's no extra burden on the translators and it could extend to arbitrary things. A similar process could be use to untranslate arbitrary common terms and also handles potential character renaming. So all the effort would be in building that mapping which probably already exists somewhere.

It would be great if it was this simple, but I believe the assumption that the Japanese honorific can always be deduced isn't always true. I believe sometimes they are just dropped on the floor. And then there's the pronoun issue I've been ignoring. For those cases we could

1. Ignore them (both or just the when the pronoun changes)
2. Ask just these cases to be marked/encoded. I hope these wouldn't be the majority so it would be less of a burden.
3. Do some fancy NLP on the translated and untranslated versions and produce a translated version. It is probably possible, but seems a bit overkill

Hoping that even with option 1, we'd be able to cover the majority of cases.

[OtonoKakuei]

Having a format where translators can input more than one translation versions for certain words or even sentences, before being converted to epub is a fantastic idea! Having more options is always good. I don't think it would require that much effort either to implement. LaTeX can do this for example.

Some positives that I could think of:

• Derive statistics to show which version is more popular to the reader base. Which should be an interesting info for JNC (or any other publishers) to know.
• No more honorific/no-honorific "debates".
• It could be applied not just to honorifics, but other stuff as well, such as:
  • Versions with translator notes and version without for stuff like Tanabata, etc (as mentioned before by Jon Mitchell)
  • R-18 and non-R-18 or PC/non-PC versions (say goodbye to controversies where translators censor stuff off their own judgment. Now we can decide for ourselves which version we want to consume)

It might also become an industry standard, just like how dual audio is now becoming the norm compared to some years ago.

[stardf29]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

It might also become an industry standard, just like how dual audio is now becoming the norm compared to some years ago.

On the one hand, what's being asked here is very different from "dual audio", which involves two very different productions, the Japanese dub and the English dub. Here we're dealing with two different translation philosophies, but they're both on the English production side. Making that an "industry standard" is probably not a good idea, especially with all the extra work it puts on the translators.

On the other hand, it might very well be possible to simply provide the original Japanese text to anyone who bought the English e-books. Sure, you'd need to learn some basic Japanese to recognize common honorifics and addresses and whatnot, but honestly, anyone who cares that much about honorifics and being closer to the Japanese text should be learning some Japanese anyway... It'd also help with the whole translation censorship problem, since it'd be easier to hold the translators accountable for major changes.

That said, I'm sure there are logistical issues to this idea as well, both in terms of licensing (probably the big potential issue) and implementation (not tech-savvy enough to know how easy/hard it is to set up a toggle between two languages in e-books). Bookwalker might actually be the easiest place to implement this, since one account there can buy both the original Japanese LNs and their English releases, so if the two were linked somehow, you could make it so buying one would allow the other to be available for free or a reduced price. Again, though, the licensing negotiations for this would probably be a headache, so I'd just file this under "a crazy idea that shouldn't be seriously pursued unless it's actually less crazy than I thought".

[Jon Mitchell]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

R-18 and non-R-18 or PC/non-PC versions (say goodbye to controversies where translators censor stuff off their own judgment. Now we can decide for ourselves which version we want to consume)

I don't think that would be a good idea:

• may be a violation of copyright / license agreement- that is editing/censoring a work, not merely translating it
• it'll open a can of worms that JNC likely would prefer closed- see all the flak other publishers got for editorial decisions that were seen as censorship
• I have a (personal) moral objection to the 'sanitization' of art - who decides 'what' is objectionable

now if an original publisher/author wants to edit a work for a different audience, they OWN it, and can do what they want and JNC can translate that edition

below is my opinion, not a response to @OtonoKakuei

to bring this back to the original topic of discussion- everything that technically can be done, should not necessarily be done. I am all in favor of (unobtrusively) adding: annotations, footnotes, end notes, glossaries, indices, supplementary materials, translator notes, commissioned art, audio tracks, media tie-ins, what have you. I believe API's for various epub readers support 'hiding' or 'revealing' this content- I am not in favor of changing the original content to meet political sensibilities. And to bring this more laser focused to the topic at hand. I don't see the value in having an entire work translated multiple times to suit different styles (toggling style "a" w/ honorifics and style "b" without) I trust the translators/editorial staff at JNC to make good artistic decisions when interpreting a work. Honorifics and foreign language words add 'seasoning' to a story, too much/too little seasoning can ruin a dish. A professional chef knows how much to use. I want to order a meal and have it be delicious. JNC is like a quality restaurant. I can order my steak cooked to the level of doneness I prefer, and I can take suggestions for what wine pairs well...I'm not going to tell the chef how to do the cooking. Toggling 'style' would be more liking going to Subway than dining at a restaurant, I mean it's still technically food but not particularly good. and combinations of ingredients might not go together well- but I made the decision to put olives on tuna salad. The idea is that I shouldn't 'choose', a competent professional interpreter makes the artistic choices, I get to enjoy them - like a fine meal prepared by a competent, professional chef. (annotations would be wine pairing, suggested by a sommelier in my analogy)

[Kevin S]

@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

So let me propose another way of doing it that hopefully would be less of a burden. Let me ignore your case of switching from a proper name to "you" for a second. Assuming there is a many-to-one mapping from the English version to the Japanese honorific, we may be able to completely automate the process. Like find "special" words like Mrs./Mr. or Teacher/Master/Dr. followed by some set of proper nouns and translate them to some set of proper nouns + "-san" or "-sensei" respectively.

It would be great if it was this simple, but I believe the assumption that the Japanese honorific can always be deduced isn't always true. I believe sometimes they are just dropped on the floor. And then there's the pronoun issue I've been ignoring. For those cases we could

1. Ignore them (both or just the when the pronoun changes)
2. Ask just these cases to be marked/encoded. I hope these wouldn't be the majority so it would be less of a burden.
3. Do some fancy NLP on the translated and untranslated versions and produce a translated version. It is probably possible, but seems a bit overkill

I'm going to try to talk about this chiefly in technical terms, but it's tricky, because as @stardf29 says, the real hurdle with this idea is a philosophical one. To prepare a translation that would be amenable to either the specific ideas here or the broader one we're discussing would be already to make some particular choices about how the localization is going to be handled, choices that are more far-reaching than you might first think.

Let's take a simple example. Your initial paragraph above suggests simply automatically replacing "Mr. Tanaka" with "Tanaka-san." The main problem is that in many (not to say all) cases, translating -san as Mr. or Mrs. is not a good idea, and a thoughtful translator won't do it. So to create a translation that did use "Mr. Tanaka," even where doing so was poor English practice, purely to accommodate this system of automated replacement, is already to begin by producing a suboptimal experience in at least one of the forms.

Even if we turn to situations where such a system might be more applicable, there are problems. To go back to my example of "Consort Gyokuyou"/"Gyokuyou-hi" from The Apothecary Diaries (which I'm highlighting because I work on it, so I have more insight into the translation process than I would on another series), she's referred to this way not just by other characters, but consistently throughout the narration. While I generally retain her title in dialogue (because of course it's important that other characters regard and refer to her that way), once it's appeared in a given segment or passage, I'll often gloss over the title in narration. To include it every single time would be unbearably tedious and redundant in English; we simply don't refer to characters in narration that way. But I would have to in order to make the proposed system work.

By the way, none of that is to mention cases where the most natural translation for "family name + honorific" might actually be a character's given name, because in English we simply tend to favor given names in a lot of ordinary, casual situations.

As for cases where a name + honorific has been translated as a second person pronoun, these would almost certainly have to be ignored, because otherwise they would need to be completely rewritten. Consider a sentence like:

田中さんはどう思いますか。
Tanaka-san wa dou omoimasu ka.

The most natural translation would probably be either "What do you think, Tanaka-san?" (if the conversation is turning to him for the first time) or simply "What do you think?" (if the speaker has already been talking to Tanaka-san). The second case in particular bothers me. If this was to be re-coded to "include the honorific," what would it look like? Does it become "what do you think, Tanaka-san," even though this might not be entirely natural within the flow of the conversation? Or is it "What does Tanaka-san think?", even though that isn't the way we address people in the second person in English?

Again, while I recognize that there are real questions about fidelity surrounding the handling of honorifics (a subject which, somewhat indirectly, I've addressed elsewhere), I think a system like this one plays to a preoccupation with this one aspect of the source language, in a way that won't be healthy for the resulting translations and still wouldn't be easy to implement.

[Jon Mitchell]

@kevin-s

Thank you ,I really appreciate that a translator took the time to comment on this topic.

I think that people forget (or just don't know) how different Japanese and English are as languages. I have zero expertise, but even I know that it isn't just a matter of 'word' substitution to interpret/translate a work. Japanese has an entirely different structure than English. (try a machine translation of a website or news story - it is often a unreadable mess!) and all languages have cultural idioms/assumptions/shortcuts as part and parcel of the way people speak and understand what is being said (or written) - I find I need to turn on subtitles for some programs from the BBC , and google phrases to decipher meaning--and they're in English!

My point is that the original subject of the post...having honorifics as a "feature" that presumably could be turned on or off is likely untenable:
"I'd like a kappa sushi, but can you substitute something for the cucumber?...like spam? ooh and make it a hand roll instead of a maki roll"
Spam onigiri is a thing, and I like it..but it isn't kappa sushi, and sometimes something 'is lost in translation' , stylistic/artistic choices by an interpreter are never going to be perfect and it isn't just a matter of honorifics (adding/removing them won't necessarily 'fix' that imperfection) I think it is more constructive to support quality professionals and offer constructive criticism where appropriate rather than to try to fix a 'bug" that isn't a bug

[OtonoKakuei]

@stardf29 said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

It might also become an industry standard, just like how dual audio is now becoming the norm compared to some years ago.

On the one hand, what's being asked here is very different from "dual audio", which involves two very different productions, the Japanese dub and the English dub. Here we're dealing with two different translation philosophies, but they're both on the English production side. Making that an "industry standard" is probably not a good idea, especially with all the extra work it puts on the translators.

The analogy wasn't meant to emphasize their similarity in terms of productions, but rather in fan demands. There had always been a kind of "war" between sub and dubs for JRPGs, which is similar to honorifics and no honorifics.

I agree that there will be extra work for the translators, though I believe it won't be anything too excessive. Industry standard was never meant to mean something would require less effort. Hygiene in the food industry/business, for example, also requires a certain amount of effort to maintain.

@jon-mitchell said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

R-18 and non-R-18 or PC/non-PC versions (say goodbye to controversies where translators censor stuff off their own judgment. Now we can decide for ourselves which version we want to consume)

I don't think that would be a good idea:

• may be a violation of copyright / license agreement- that is editing/censoring a work, not merely translating it
• it'll open a can of worms that JNC likely would prefer closed- see all the flak other publishers got for editorial decisions that were seen as censorship
• I have a (personal) moral objection to the 'sanitization' of art - who decides 'what' is objectionable

now if an original publisher/author wants to edit a work for a different audience, they OWN it, and can do what they want and JNC can translate that edition

I suppose I didn't think too deeply about this point. I personally don't like censorship either, doesn't matter if the story is offensive to the general populace or not. When I think about it though, I guess even different versions won't stop PC police from picking fault at the book.

And to bring this more laser focused to the topic at hand. I don't see the value in having an entire work translated multiple times to suit different styles (toggling style "a" w/ honorifics and style "b" without)

In regard to toggling honorifics, the entire work is not going to be translated multiple times. Only certain words/sentences will have multiple translation versions. The rest stays the same. Example:

See you later \v1{Bell-san}\v2{Mr. Bell}~

Only one version will remain once the format is converted to epub/prepub.

I agree that even if something can be done, that it doesn't necessarily need to be done. However, if it is something that has a good amount of demands and if it doesn't require too much effort to implement, I would say "why not?". This feature won't be detrimental to the readers in any way. If you like the version that the translator would originally translate it to then you simply pick the default version. Others who prefer honorifics can pick the other version.

Regarding your analogy. Instead of it being a steak and a subway sandwich comparison, I'd like to think that having different versions is more akin to having the liberty to add salt to the steak because of your preference. Since the 2 versions won't differ too much aside from the honorifics.

[myskaros]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I would say "why not?"

Because it is not as little work as you're making it out to be, and it would not sell enough additional copies of books to make up for the additional time and labor required to make this a reality.

[stardf29]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I agree that there will be extra work for the translators, though I believe it won't be anything too excessive.

Unfortunately, the amount of extra work for translators this would be is not really something those of us strictly on the consumer side can judge reliably. Suggestions like these should be made with the attitude of "might be worth considering if it's not too much work, but if it is, then don't bother". We fans should avoid entering that dangerous territory of making demands of translators and editors under assumptions of how easy or hard we think it would be; the last thing we want is for "fans" to cause issues with working conditions for the localization team.

[TheGrimLich]

I'm getting vibes of asking a scientist "Why not try [simple solution to complex problem]?" in this thread... the answer tends to be, "Because if [simple solution] worked, we would've already done it by now."

[OtonoKakuei]

@kevin-s said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@taapaye said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I propose asking the translators to just encode both options in the source.

One thing I don't think anyone has brought up yet is that I just don't think this would be nearly as simple an undertaking as it initially sounds. I'm thinking of the dozens of times that names appear in any given part; making sure every one of them is accounted for and that the correct honorific is used (remember that each character won't necessarily be addressed with the same honorific all the time); the additional time and complexity not just for the translator, but for the editors and QA staff making sure everything is correct and accounted for.

You could use regular expression to check whether everything is accounted for or not. A small program can be used to scan the document and check for every names that have not been accounted for (given a list of names that might appear in the book).

Regarding replacing names automatically with their honorific counterparts, as long as the English naming is consistent, it shouldn't be a problem. But, if they differ, then as long as there are no omitted Japanese sentences in the English translation nor are there added sentences in the English translation (sentence count between JP and EN is the same), then this could also be done automatically with a program.

[rsog412]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

Regarding replacing names automatically with their honorific counterparts, as long as the English naming is consistent, it shouldn't be a problem. But, if they differ, then as long as there are no omitted Japanese sentences in the English translation nor are there added sentences in the English translation (sentence count between JP and EN is the same), then this could also be done automatically with a program.

This is not a safe assumption. One sentence can be translated as two sentences or two sentences can be translated as one sentence. Neither of those is an omission or an addition. Different languages have different ways of expressing the same idea.

[OtonoKakuei]

@myskaros said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I would say "why not?"

Because it is not as little work as you're making it out to be, and it would not sell enough additional copies of books to make up for the additional time and labor required to make this a reality.

As previously mentioned. LaTeX, for example, can do this already. In the case of using LaTeX, the work that would need to be done would be:

• translators have to adapt to using LaTeX instead of word or whatever word processor they were using
• JNC also need to make changes to their website to reflect this change (show different versions, settings, etc).

@stardf29 said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

I agree that there will be extra work for the translators, though I believe it won't be anything too excessive.

Unfortunately, the amount of extra work for translators this would be is not really something those of us strictly on the consumer side can judge reliably. Suggestions like these should be made with the attitude of "might be worth considering if it's not too much work, but if it is, then don't bother". We fans should avoid entering that dangerous territory of making demands of translators and editors under assumptions of how easy or hard we think it would be; the last thing we want is for "fans" to cause issues with working conditions for the localization team.

If that's the mentality we should have, then I suppose there's no real reason in having a discussion in suggestion threads. Staffs should first enter the thread and say whether they will consider the suggestion or not before we can engage into discussion.

@rsog412 said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

Regarding replacing names automatically with their honorific counterparts, as long as the English naming is consistent, it shouldn't be a problem. But, if they differ, then as long as there are no omitted Japanese sentences in the English translation nor are there added sentences in the English translation (sentence count between JP and EN is the same), then this could also be done automatically with a program.

This is not a safe assumption. One sentence can be translated as two sentences or two sentences can be translated as one sentence. Neither of those is an omission or an addition. Different languages have different ways of expressing the same idea.

Yes. In that case, it'd not work unless there's a dedicated software that could output a map of translated sentence(s) and the original sentence. Which of course wouldn't be as trivial to do compared to the previous solutions.

[stardf29]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

If that's the mentality we should have, then I suppose there's no real reason in having a discussion in suggestion threads. Staffs should first enter the thread and say whether they will consider the suggestion or not before we can engage into discussion.

There's a clear difference between "maybe this idea can work" and "this idea is totally easy to do". But if your idea of "discussion" on suggestions involves making assumptions on how easy it will be to implement it, then yeah, I'd say don't have that "discussion" because at that point it's more like making demands.

translators have to adapt to using LaTeX instead of word or whatever word processor they were using

Keep in mind, translation is a freelance job and forcing a bunch of freelancers to adapt to new software, whether for a specific company or for the entire localization industry, is way more complex than just getting the folks in a single office used to new software. And that's not even taking into account whether or not LaTeX might have disadvantages in other areas compared to existing systems that make it not worth the "advantages" of appealing to a niche group of readers who like their Japanese honorifics a lot.

[Jon Mitchell]

@otonokakuei
full disclosure: I do not speak Japanese, I am an English speaker with a smattering of several Latin based languages (Spanish/French/Italian)

these "rules" you keep referring to - automatically substitute title "a" for honorific "b" or visa versa - may work when translating related languages with similar rules (like Castillian to Catalan) but fail when the languages are structurally (and culturally) very different- that is why MTL sucks - every time a substitution might be applied, human judgement needs to come into play. Interpretation isn't that simple. I assume that the translation team come up with something like a 'style guide' when starting a project, so that tone, character mannerisms etc. are consistent throughout the work, and if/how/when honorifics are used is part of that 'style' - it is integral to the interpretation of the work. If a word for word substitution were sufficient to translate a work - google would've put JNC out of a job already - we'd all just read MTLs

you can put ketchup on a steak, should you?

[rsog412]

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

If that's the mentality we should have, then I suppose there's no real reason in having a discussion in suggestion threads. Staffs should first enter the thread and say whether they will consider the suggestion or not before we can engage into discussion.

I think we can engage in discussion just fine - but our discussion should be limited to our own experience. We can talk about how much we want/don't want/don't care about a thing, but we shouldn't make assertions about how easy it would be to implement.

Taking my own advice here, I'm going to stop arguing the technical points. While I know enough Japanese to read novels (very very slowly, with the help of a dictionary), I've never done translation professionally and wouldn't be able to. My experience in that only comes from looking at translated works and comparing with the source text. In the end, I only see things from the consumer side.

From the consumer side:

• If this feature existed in the form you describe, where the Japanese address and honorifics are re-inserted back into the final product after a translator has done whatever they can to render the meaning that the honorific conveyed into English, I would not use it. (Please don't construe my acknowledgement that this cheaper form is possible as me agreeing that creating it would be cheap or easy.)
• If this feature existed in its ideal form, where the net result is as if the translation team had done the translation twice in different styles (one with honorifics left in, and one with honorifics rendered into English), I would probably use it for at least some series.

[OtonoKakuei]

@stardf29 said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

If that's the mentality we should have, then I suppose there's no real reason in having a discussion in suggestion threads. Staffs should first enter the thread and say whether they will consider the suggestion or not before we can engage into discussion.

There's a clear difference between "maybe this idea can work" and "this idea is totally easy to do". But if your idea of "discussion" on suggestions involves making assumptions on how easy it will be to implement it, then yeah, I'd say don't have that "discussion" because at that point it's more like making demands.

My argument was that "such and such idea could work because I believe there are pros to the idea as well the amount of effort that would be needed to do such work". It is not a demand in any way, not quite sure why you see it as that. Yes, I emphasize how easy it is to implement to sell the idea. It is not a baseless assumption, since it's based on the experience I've had working as a software developer.

Keep in mind, translation is a freelance job and forcing a bunch of freelancers to adapt to new software, whether for a specific company or for the entire localization industry, is way more complex than just getting the folks in a single office used to new software. And that's not even taking into account whether or not LaTeX might have disadvantages in other areas compared to existing systems that make it not worth the "advantages" of appealing to a niche group of readers who like their Japanese honorifics a lot.

Well, I can't really reply to this since you don't have an understanding of how LaTeX works. If I say it's not that hard to use since you can use templates and such, would you say that this is yet another demand? Sigh, let's just say I give up. The staff already said it's not worth the effort anyway.

@jon-mitchell said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei
full disclosure: I do not speak Japanese, I am an English speaker with a smattering of several Latin based languages (Spanish/French/Italian)

these "rules" you keep referring to - automatically substitute title "a" for honorific "b" or visa versa - may work when translating related languages with similar rules (like Castillian to Catalan) but fail when the languages are structurally (and culturally) very different- that is why MTL sucks - every time a substitution might be applied, human judgement needs to come into play. Interpretation isn't that simple. I assume that the translation team come up with something like a 'style guide' when starting a project, so that tone, character mannerisms etc. are consistent throughout the work, and if/how/when honorifics are used is part of that 'style' - it is integral to the interpretation of the work. If a word for word substitution were sufficient to translate a work - google would've put JNC out of a job already - we'd all just read MTLs

It's just a dictionary based substitution, nothing too complicated. It doesn't really matter whether the structure's similar or not as long as it's possible to find the equivalent sentence in the raw. If let's say we want to substitute "Mr. Bell" with "Bell-[honorific]", we'd have to find the equivalent sentence in the raw, find the word "ベル" in that sentence, extract the honorific trailing behind the word and do another lookup in dictionary to see how the honorific should be translated to English, then substitute [honorific] with the actual English honorific. Why the rules don't matter is because we're only looking for specific words (name) within the sentence.

you can put ketchup on a steak, should you?
Funny you ask this. I usually do add ketchup (chili sauce actually) to my steak if I don't like how it originally tastes.

@rsog412 said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

@otonokakuei said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:

If that's the mentality we should have, then I suppose there's no real reason in having a discussion in suggestion threads. Staffs should first enter the thread and say whether they will consider the suggestion or not before we can engage into discussion.

I think we can engage in discussion just fine - but our discussion should be limited to our own experience. We can talk about how much we want/don't want/don't care about a thing, but we shouldn't make assertions about how easy it would be to implement.

The "assumption" that it's easy to implement is based on my experience as a software developer for 9 years.

From the consumer side:

• If this feature existed in the form you describe, where the Japanese address and honorifics are re-inserted back into the final product after a translator has done whatever they can to render the meaning that the honorific conveyed into English, I would not use it. (Please don't construe my acknowledgement that this cheaper form is possible as me agreeing that creating it would be cheap or easy.)
• If this feature existed in its ideal form, where the net result is as if the translation team had done the translation twice in different styles (one with honorifics left in, and one with honorifics rendered into English), I would probably use it for at least some series.

I don't think I've argued that I prefer having honorifics more or not in my posts. I just believe that having the option has its pros that could make it worth considering.

Personally though, as you said in your first point, I have no problems with not having honorifics if it's translated like that. I think I only abhor the lack of honorifics in Danmachi and Shield Hero.

[TAAPAye]

@kevin-s
In regards the automatically replacing "Mr. Tanaka" with "Tanaka-san", I don't yet fill this is infeasible. The high level assumption was "Mr." would also come from "-san" and not "-san" to "Mr." I don't know if this assumption holds, but "-san" being translated to possible multiple things isn't a real issue. The only other example I no Fuji-san being translated to Mt. Fuji. So in this limited example we could map

• Mt -> san
• Mr -> san
• Mrs -> san

Now if it just gets dropped, that is unfortunate. However, it would claim that if it gets dropped or if the many to 1-to-manny mapping isn't true then we've already lost the info and are no worse than the current version at the very least

I do agree we shouldn't lower translation quality to force this system to work. If anything we should just accept missing honorifics in a few places. Your explanation about the pronouns seems convincing enough to accept that it is too much work. For the narration, it also seems fine omitting the honorifics since they don't seem to add anything.

I'm not trying to be a purist. If it just covered the majority of cases, I'd be content.

I do really appreciate the concrete examples.