Subbers becoming weeaboo-ish?

Well, like, does keeping in some small words really make the difference between whether something is faithfully japanese? When they translate english shows into japanese, is it no longer considered english unless they use our variants of those honorifics?

edited 22nd Jun '11 6:15:04 PM by Justin_Brett

It's not a matter of being faithfully japanese, but being faithful, period.

Also, japanese dubbed english work can suck just as badly as english dubs.

edited 22nd Jun '11 6:18:24 PM by Signed

^^The problem is that we don't have variants of all of the honorifics.

edited 22nd Jun '11 6:18:51 PM by INUH

I don't give a damn what the Japanese do in their dubs. Why should I?

The thing is, the question here isn't what makes the best professional translation. The audience for these things, by and large, doesn't care how professional the translation is. Indeed, during the manga boom the more successful commercial translators drifted away from professionalism to suit their audience.

Translations are created for an audience. There is no "perfect" translation anywhere. How good they are is determined entirely by what the audience wants to see. And in general fansubbers have a pretty good feel for what their audience wants to see.

edited 22nd Jun '11 6:30:21 PM by Clarste

This reminds me of the Mari Mite sub thing. Nozomi's short teasers showed that they weren't retaining the honorifics and replaced them with Miss and Lady for -san and -sama. Onee-sama got replaced with Dear Sister. I don't know what the equivalent to -chan is in those as I either watch it without subs or with the honorific filled subs.

The people who would be making the big money that would make this release a worthy venture all more or less said that they would not purchase the box sets if they did not include the honorifics in tact. Nozomi really had no choice but to make a separate set of subs with the honorifics in addition to the non-honorific subs. Both sets are on each disk of the four boxsets. That or take the hit and lose money from it.

Most of the cultural jokes and such are left in as well with notes in the extras section.

It's a rather nice release really and I love it dearly...save the redundant horror that is yamayuri lily. Honestly I am surprised it made it over at all...

edited 22nd Jun '11 7:01:39 PM by Aondeug

Wouldn't that make it sound like they're talking to nuns?

I suppose? I just thought it sounded very odd and fantasy like, but then that fits I suppose. The girls are unmistakably Japanese, but they live in a very odd Japan with no cell phones...It's obviously not reality that they live in.

The nuns don't show up very often. I don't know what they call the school's head mistress...She's the only nun I can recall showing up at all in the anime actually.

edited 22nd Jun '11 7:04:43 PM by Aondeug

I like what overtime subs with honorifics sometimes.

Gotou-chan becomes Brotou.

I dont mind the removal of honorifics that much (I hear em anyway, why should the subs have them though?) unless its done to make a point.

I more get annoyed by leaving crap in that has no point of being untranslated, like Kisama-Tachi (again TV Nihon)

Brotou is awesome. That is all that must be known about it.

Right, so right behind me I have a copy of Wandering Son, translated by Matt Thorn. He could reasonably be considered a professional in his field. All honorifics are retained in the translation.

In the back of the book, he argues that keeping the honorifics in manga translations, is, for the most part, unnecessary and adds nothing to the translation outside of making it more obtuse. However, in the case of Wandering Son, he states that, due to the nature of the work, the honorifics are retained as they convey important subtleties that otherwise would not be conveyed.

Which sounds about right to me. I don't think most works really benefit all that much from honorifics, and certainly not from retaining things like 'keikaku,' as they appear in the series more as quirks of the language they were written in than as intentionally placed tidbits that give a better idea who the characters are and help provide a better context into what is occurring. It's somewhat the same as how translating the line 'Mr. Anderson" from The Matrix into Japanese as "MISUTA ANDAASON" over "Andaason-san" wouldn't really provide any extra meaning, but would make it sound completely unnatural and silly.

That said, when a series gets into an issue like gender roles, which are conveyed in Japanese almost entirely differently than they are in English, or perhaps in, say, historical political dramas, where the respective ranks of the individuals becomes significantly important, the honorifics become something that present important information in a way that can't be translated in a natural-sounding manner into English. At that point, there's a reason to retain the honorifics beyond letting the readers know they're in the oh-so-cool-but-not-really-fandom-club.

So yeah. There's that.

edited 22nd Jun '11 11:11:00 PM by Miijhal

And thats exactly why I had to do so much surgery to the CR version of Hourou Musuko for it to be watchable.

There are some shows where the absence of honorifics doesn't bother me too much, or at least not enough to fix it myself if someone else isn't doing a version with honorifics, but shows like Hourou Musuko, Otome Youkai Zakuro, or really anything where the prime conflict comes from the interactions of the characters and their relationships, especially if the show is actually taking place in Japan, with a primarily Japanese set of characters.

Oh, something I alluded to earlier, but never expanded on. One good reason for fansubbers, or now sites like Crunchyroll, to not mess with honorifics too much is that its a really easy way to translate yourself into a corner if you guess wrong about how things will go.

If you preemptively remove honorifics from the dialog, and then a major event happens which revolves around the presence or absence of honorifics (as in my hypothetical example earlier, or the any number of actual scenes it was based on), then the translator is stuck in a position where they either have to completely rewrite the dialog (which is a bad idea), or just translate it accurately, and have it look really stupid.

And on another, more tangential note, one reason I don't want fansubbers specifically fucking around with the dialog too much is that I don't especially trust most of them to be able to do it well.

Yeah that can lead to alot of confusion when honorifics or pronoun use is important to the plot.

Like Persona 4 and the boku thing.

In the German translation of the Marimite novels (the few that actually came out here) and mangas, they abolished the honorifics, but instead the younger girls used a formal "you" when talking to the older ones. Also, instead of "onee-sama", "grande soeur" was used all the time.

Many fans had a hissy fit over this, but I liked it.

I'd likely grumble a bit, but honestly I'd be happy the fucking things were over here at all. I'd grumble. And then squee. And continue doing just that.

edited 23rd Jun '11 12:06:50 AM by Aondeug

It just occurred to me that this is really only a problem with European languages: it's a quirk of Japanese that it's very very easy to transliterate in the Latin alphabet.

For example, all Chinese translations have to excise most of the honorifics because they can't render them in the original language. There are exceptions like -sama, which is written in kanji anyway (樣), but most of the time this is eschewed in favour of the much more native 大人.

Taiwanese localisations will sometimes transliterate idioms like the ubiquitous kawai (卡哇伊): mostly because they're frequently used amongst the Taiwanese, but these are few and far between.

^ Unrelated, but you just made me think of an entire country becoming moe (and not like Hetalia) complete with giant eyes and a verbal tic.

x5 To be fair the Boku would never have worked in english no matter how you work it. The voice though was the key to the fact that it was a dull reveal in the english version.

The problem with "grande soeur" is that unlike Onee-(honorific), it's never used for people who are not actually sisters (like cousins).

The French translation of Mahou Sensei Negima uses it for Nekane, who is Negi's cousin. It looked like the translators (or the speaker) actually thought she was his sister, something that's completely absent from the English scanlation.

Something I've been wondering about: how do people like Calling Your Attacks to be rendered? 'Cause I've seen some companies translate them, while others leave them in Japanese (though possibly with a footnote translation). What're y'all's opinions on that?

Personally, I think that just depends on the context. If the series takes place in Japan (or at least some world with a significant Japanese cultural influence), it makes sense to leave it in Japanese, but if it's in a Constructed World, it might be better translated into English.

Like names, I would translate those as the language they represent. Katakana is an obvious sign that it's not meant to be in Japanese.

To me, it depends on which version sounds less stupid to the intended reader.

Can't have Goku go around shouting 'turtle wave attack!', can we?

Unless it's being shouted. Katakana is sometimes used like ALL CAPS.

edited 23rd Jun '11 5:26:35 AM by Clarste