an opinion about honorific
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While I personally don't overly mind honorifics in tranlsations, I'm not really fond of them and think that they shouldn't be included unless there are compelling reasons to keep them.
Furthermore, I find @Bookmaker's interpretation of the honorifics in the first post interesting. While dropping the honorific obviously signals something, I'd never associate -san with respect, but rather with being baseline polite. Similarly, using -chan for a small child (as opposed to a woman who's not an old friend/acquaintance) has no connotation of adoration for me, but is just the normal thing to do in Japanese.
Also, I'll never get how people can argue all night and day about honorifics, but nobody ever complains that more than 20 different words get translated as “I”.
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@jaquobus That's a very interesting point about "I." That said I've definitely seen cases where "jibun" is properly translated as "This one" or "Myself" and on the other hand the stuff like "Waga" etc. gets translated as "The great I" (in Death March for example). However many of those simply sound awkward and the impression of arrogance or superiority can be made by attitude rather than directly translating the pronoun. I think it's important to keep in mind that while honorifics are easier to understand with only a cursory knowledge of Japanese, the nuances of pronouns are significantly more difficult and it doesn't help that fansubs etc. often don't bother with conveying that.
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I said the same thing in the "translation sfx" topic, but it's a slippery slope when you start down the path of "there's no perfect translation, so let's leave it untranslated." Where do you draw the line? Does the line move as society evolves?
With regards to audience, as a business, it's more beneficial to target larger audiences than to cater to niche ones. It's much more likely for a newcomer/visitor to be turned off by untranslated honorifics than it is for an anime/manga/LN fan to boycott the company because honorifics aren't retained.
As a translation company, it also looks better for JNC to put in effort to translate everything possible to avoid awkward questions from potential Japanese partners like "In the sample you gave us, why did you leave -san and -sama? is it not Mister/Miss and Master in English?"
I just feel like there are so many more advantages to translating honorifics than there are to keeping them.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
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@myskaros That's certainly a good point. In the end it honestly seems to come down to the translators' preference. It's easy to find official translations that leave them and on the other hand those that don't. I honestly don't think there's enough data on fan preference for there to be a clear cut decision on ALL media. I do believe there are some series with truly mass appeal where it's wise to leave them out though.
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@myskaros i do agree with your reasoning.. what i feel weird is the lack of something that honorific add to literature.. if that can be solved then i have no complain.. in many case, it's better to translate the honorific than to flat out drop it.
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@bookmaker I agree. I would say that honorifics add less than people who complain about losing them think they do. 90% of the time, the nuances they impart can be completely ignored without affecting the audience's perception of the characters' relationships. The few times it does matter, they can be represented appropriately in English via translation.
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@myskaros now, back on my case.. the main problem is that on some series that i bought from JNC, the honorific is discarded rather than translated properly.. it's really disturbing for me, enough to consider not to buy another from that series.. it changed my perspective about character relationship. since i enjoy character relationship on literature more than a plot itself, that make me reserved to read the whole novel.. i am pretty excited when i bought them, then when i read half of it i just skimmed the rest since it bored me and at that point i only wanted to know the plot since my curiosity for character relationship is gone..
i know that it's close to ranting, sorry about that..
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@bookmaker In the end, you know what you want and you can make your own decisions on what you want to buy, so if this really is a dealbreaker for you... well, I hope you find books that suit your needs.
If you might allow me to persuade you, though, from a culture perspective, other non-Japanese cultures get by defining and expressing relationships just fine without prolific honorifics. If you're unable to determine how characters view each other from a single suffix, it sounds like you're not paying attention to all the other contextual clues that are used to convey that information.
- Aside from the first time two characters meet or talk about each other, do you really need a constant reminder that "oh, she's his big sister," or "this guy has a very important social position"?
- If the answer is yes, I would say this is a problem that goes far beyond whether or not honorifics are kept in text.
- If the answer is no, then why is a simple description of the relationship when the characters first introduced so much worse than honorifics? They both accomplish the same thing.
- Character relationships are defined by the way they interact with each other, not what honorific they use. Honorifics are simply a shortcut that takes advantage of a cultural system already in place in Japan.
- Aside from the first time two characters meet or talk about each other, do you really need a constant reminder that "oh, she's his big sister," or "this guy has a very important social position"?
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Considering that Realist Hero is a non-Japanese European style fantasy world, the honorifics would actually distract from the translation imo.
Honestly, if you read non-manga/non-Light Novel translations of Japanese fiction honorifics are very very very rarely used. It's only in our very small subculture that any translator would consider using them.
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I'm in the no honorifics camp, myself. I can understand why translators might leave them in in video games or manga where the amount of space to write is limited and writing around them is therefore harder, but a novel does not suffer from that problem.
My main issue is where do you draw the line with honorifics? I think most manga and anime fans would know common ones such as -san, -kun, and -chan but what about -meijin or -senshu or -bucho? There are tons of honorifics based on job titles alone. And that doesn't even address that some honorifics don't have one cut-and-dry meaning - if a newly introduced character that you have no other context about is called -sensei, are they a teacher, a doctor, or a mangaka?
Honestly I think the context that honorifics bring could be added in other ways that are more natural to read in English. Not using them avoids confusion or the need to have a translation page explaining what honorifics mean.
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@raddevlin how about making a short note in the beginning of Novels that explain the meaning of all the honorifics used in that novel? That way everyone would be pleased, no?
Edit: seems like you already considered that.
"I drowned a fish, killed a dead tree and made medicine sick"
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@imilyaz It's not a great solution, honestly. Again, imagine someone who really doesn't know anything about the Japanese language getting a page or more of non-story exposition about what a bunch of words mean, followed by an entire novel littered with words they have to keep flipping back to the front to check what they mean.
As @the-green-death brought up, "keeping stuff untranslated" is pretty much restricted only to anime/manga/LNs from Japan. If you tried it with anything else, there would be massive blowback.
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@myskaros Translation notes are quite a common thing though. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand people who don't like them and JNC's approach is excellent. However if you look at Seven Seas, Yen Press or the defunct Del Rey they provided explanations that are/were not difficult to understand nor required constant referencing (I'm saying this as someone who didn't speak Japanese at the time I read them).
Japanese as a language and Japanese culture is so different from the west that I believe there are times when it's appropriate to leave things like honorifics intact. It certainly applies more to some media than others and while it's easier to make a case for manga and anime I still believe there are times that it's appropriate for light novels as well.
With myself included I don't believe sweeping generalizations about any translated media are correct. Probably most novels it's not necessary to leave them intact, but for some if you include proper translation notes and explanations it enhances the experience and unless we have actual data (say reader surveys) it's impossible to truly say that one way or another is best.
Anyway, I hope that none of you who don't like leaving such things intact will take this the wrong way. I think nearly everyone in this thread has made excellent points and it's impossible to say any of us are truly correct. I completely understand the points of those who disagree with me and in the end I don't at all mind reading LNs or manga where honorifics and such are left out. All that matters is that there is a quality translation that truly conveys the original author's intent. I believe the JNC translators have done quite well at this regardless of how they choose to translate.
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@gonki I think translation notes are fine. They usually refer to one-off sentences or phrases that have double meaning or are hard to translate. With regards to Del Rey and honorifics, though, you're talking about a translation reference page (I actually went and checked my Negima manga to see how they handled it even before you replied haha :P), which is what I was referring to when I mentioned "a page or more of non-story exposition."
In addition, unless you're referring to a LN I haven't read, your examples of Seven Seas, Yen Press, and Del Rey refer to manga, no? The average number of words per volume of manga is drastically less than a LN, so there's much less occasion to leave an untranslated phrase.
I have a story that... I don't know what the right answer is, but thought it might be some fun food for thought. When I was still an otaku-in-training, I heard about this neat new anime called Bakemonogatari. Obsessed with the artwork and story, I went looking for anything NisiOisiN I could find and landed on Del Rey's release of Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle. An aside, but wow, can't even translate the title? These aren't exactly common words, and they have perfectly good English translations too :/ and Vertical somehow felt justified in leaving it partially untranslated as well, what the heck lol.
This book, unlike Del Rey's manga, does not include an explanation of honorifics, and they left honorifics intact. However, my big beef is that the main character, the narrator, is never named, and only referred to as "Ii-chan." Since Del Rey didn't translate beyond the second book, I never learned if there was a reason why the protagonist didn't get a name; either way, at the time, I remember being excessively confused about what "ii-chan" meant - was it actually his name? a pet name? a reference to something I was supposed to understand? Considering the cast list at the beginning of the book simply listed him as "Me," I ended up having to search on the Internet to figure this out, and back then the answer was not exactly forthcoming.
This situation is definitely an anomaly, since it involves all of untranslated honorifics, an unnamed protagonist, a nickname for said protagonist, a book narrated by an unreliable narrator, and an author known for very quirky writing. Beyond all those is the fact that there simply is no name to translate or dress up in English, and cutting out -chan to call him "Ii" isn't exactly an improvement either.
I dunno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I apologize if I seem overly confrontational about this issue, I actually don't really care either way personally, but I do think it is an interesting topic to debate, so I've just been enthusiastic with my attempts to persuade towards the "translate everything" camp.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
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I feel like the choice to drop honorifics, or other hard-to-translate words is always going to be situation specific, leaning towards removing them where possible. You are presenting the story in another (very different) language, leaving the book in some form of pidgin, even if it's one generally understood by fans, might not be the best way to get new readers. The goal is to reach as broad an audience with as little hurdles (like pages of translation notes) as possible. Because these companies need new readers to make more money. And we want them to make money, or we'll all have to learn Japanese :P.
There's always going to be situations when removing them severely impacts delivery. There's some words that, situationally, can be really challenging to localize too. But those situations should be few and far between for a skilled translator/editor.
In my experience, no one's going to agree on this topic, the fanaticism regarding it frequently reaches religious levels.
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@flarecde said in an opinion about honorific:
the fanaticism regarding it frequently reaches religious levels.
Haha... so true.
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@myskaros I think playing devil's advocate (so to say) is fine. :) I also agree it's an interesting topic to debate and one that no camps will ever agree on. The above comment about fanaticism is too true. And yes, I was referring to manga. Probably my beef as it were to leaving out honorifics is that there are a lot of translators that don't bother to find another way to convey the nuance. I don't mean this as a criticism of JNC (since I feel they do a good job) or translators that choose to leave them in. In my view it's a stylistic choice and also a matter of how the translator thinks it best to convey the author's original meaning.
Just as an example of something I absolutely hate is Funimation's choice to translate "Onee-sama" as "Sissy" in Railgun and Index. I can't overstate how much that drives me nuts. There had to be a better way to translate that. And apologies for that random comment but it drives me nuts and I needed an outlet to say it!
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@imilyaz think the manga version of Negima did that (probably others as well). They had an appendix explaining the honorifics, some cultural things and the food if I remember correctly.
As far my personal opinion on honorifics, I would say I WAS for them. But after reading some these post (at least in the realm of light novels) they seem to be a minor thing. The honorific issue wouldn't have stopped me from buying a light novel unless it was iconic like Onii-sama in Mahouka. But that just in light novels and perhaps manga. In the case of anime I prefer honorific 100 percent to the point that I like fan subs over the legit versions any day. I used to think of it as a part of their culture and removing it was like removing a piece of that culture since it seems like they place more emphasis on social hierarchy than westerners would. Sort of like the difference between formal and casual language, or the meaning of using someone's first name. It seems lost if not explained properly. I also don't mind the exposure to the culture they have over there that it may bring. Then again as I think about it, my preference for not "westernizing" it may come from watching anime from the early 90s. I remember the tokyo tower being called the eiffel tower in sailor moon and rice balls being called donuts in pokemon. I know those are extreme cases but you give an inch they take a mile.
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I personally don't really mind removing them, most of the time. Though sometimes they can be useful.
Just for the love of god. No Mr. Welf, or Sissie.
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@corp20 all Del Rey manga had a section at the front explaining common honourifics. If they'd only added "Onee-chan" to the list for Negima it would have saved them a lot of pain later...
