What's the taboo about using translated titles?

Actually, Hagane no Renkinjutsushi literally translates to "The Alchemist of Metal" or, more accurately, "The Alchemist of Steel". But yeah, the subtitle is always "Fullmetal Alchemist".

Similar cases are also very common in translations, with The Foreign Subtitle solution, when the translators keep the original title, and add a subtitle in their own language, usually either as a direct ranslation, or a generic explanation about what it means, so there are lots of "redundant" titles that could be translate back to english as something like "Star Wars: The War of Stars", or "Lost: Lost" or "Prison Break: The Escape".

"Redundant" is in quotation marks, because it actually makes sense: The first part is the name of the show that some people might even already know, and most will end up using anyways, and the latter as an explanation for the meaning behind the name.

edited 7th Sep '11 11:19:16 AM by Ever9

edited 7th Sep '11 11:43:30 AM by Noaqiyeum

@Heath:No, "Masked Rider" is present in most of the logos. [1]◊, [2]◊, [3]◊*

edited 7th Sep '11 11:54:07 AM by ThatHuman

Would they not also pick up on the same usage of the original word?

edited 7th Sep '11 11:56:42 AM by EvilOtaku

Then again, the average Nurarihyon No Mago viewer would probably already know what youkai means, probably even more so, and without having to wait for the realization that this time, it's the old folkloric meaning, and not the mainstream one.

Edit: ninjad.

edited 7th Sep '11 12:00:28 PM by Ever9

Oh, then it is just like that. I missed it in my quick Google-fu for 'Kamen Rider' (the 'Masked Rider' subtitles are unreadable in the first few samples)

The average person has quite a bit of context for what 'fay' means immediately. Not so much for 'youkai'. The semantic leap is considerably narrower.

So? We aren't dealing with Fey, we're dealing with Youkai, which come from a completely different cultural background.

Japanese Youkai are not, really, that similar to European Fey other than general concept, and I don't see whats wrong with actually using the more accurate term. Also I think you are highly over-estimating the penetration of the term "fey". And "Faerie" has all sorts of other context loaded into it now.

As for the Madoka Magica stuff, I don't care if people call the show "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (I don't, but it doesn't bother me), what I do care about is the absolute idiocy of "translating" Mahou Shoujo into "Puella Magi", which is just unforgivably stupid.

Regarding your first two points, I believe you're completely missing the point of a translation, and also I think exaggerating the differences between the concepts. As for the matter of informational penetration... I suppose we'll have to disagree until someone can measure that statistically.

Youkai = any supernatural creature, pretty much.

Fey = ... well, it brings to mind fairies, which has become considerably less impressive given Victorian literature. Unless you're familiar with Celtic folklore and stuff, you're highly unlikely to equate the two—in that case, the word (though isn't fey an adjective?) might be able to cover it all. Might. It still seems rather narrower.

No, I disagree with overtranslation.

I am not actually interested in an "english" version of whatever I'm watching. I just need a translation because I don't speak Japanese to any great extent. Its far more useful to use the term Youkai (which for that matter is frequently defined somewhat differently from series to series anyway) then to "translate" it into an obscure word that isn't used much anyway.

edited 7th Sep '11 1:54:18 PM by SakurazakiSetsuna

On the rare cases I actually see the word 'fey' when not in very specific fantasy, it's usually used to mean something more like wild and dangerous rather than refer to a creature.

Faerie will be mistaken for fairy.

I don't know about other people, but when you say fey, I think of fairies and elves and beings from Celtic mythology, not a general catch-all term for "supernatural being". It would be like calling Celty a youkai.

...let me experiment a bit here:

Celty, the Celtic youkai. Nurarihyon, the Japanese fairy.

...-snerk-

You know, if we're referring to supernatural beings that come from Japanese folklore, isn't it strange to refer to them using a term from Christian terminology (demon) or some other Western term like fae? I'd use some term with less loaded cultural connotations, such as supernatural being, but that's too unwieldy. A lot of terms that we use in English to refer to supernatural beings are usually loaded with connotations because they originally referred to a specific species of supernatural being. That would only confuse the viewers even more, because if I read "fairy", I think oooh cute little girl with wings. If I read elf I think pointy ears and pretty faces. If I read demon... well, not me specifically, but I imagine people think of demons as opposed to angels, for example. So I don't see a problem with keeping youkai untranslated, since it's a complex cultural concept without a real equivalent in English.

But if we're talking about what word people are more familiar with, the average Nurarihyon reader will be a regular manga reader, and so will be more familiar with youkai compared to fey. Since youkai appears fairly commonly in anime/manga. In contrast, if we're talking about regular fantasy readers, they'll be more familiar with fey compared to youkai.

I do agree with Sakurazaki's attitude. We're talking about what's going to be more useful in terms of helping the reader understand the work. Translating every single word into English isn't always necessarily going to make things less confusing - the reverse might be the case.

edited 7th Sep '11 2:02:33 PM by Anarchy

Also, the only thing I've ever seen youkai get considerable use in is relevant to Touhou... and there's absolutely no point in trying to make that easily comprehensible to Western audiences, given that it references everything from Buddhist teachings and Shinto to Japanese fairytales and miscellaneous bits of folklore... XD

^Footnotes explaining the references would help, probably.

It would need a number comparable to Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei... and it's a doujin game series. Think on that.

Overtranslating hindering comprehension is definitively an issue. I got really trouble understanding the concept of 'kami', for example. This word is almost always translated as 'god', which may be somewhat similar (if we take the polytheist meaning of 'god'), but it is not quite the same thing. However, 'kami' may just as well be used to refer to 'spirits', 'ghosts' or 'force of nature', not being really 'gods' at all. The place where I could get the better grasp of its meaning was in Shogun which doesn't translate the word at all and it is a British/Irish book, in the first place).

So, yeah, beware overtranslation. Concepts that are loaded with cultural meaning shouldn't be translated, in many cases, specially if the understanding of the meaning of the concept is actually important.

Even if you would be right, I wasn't talking about "the average person", but about "the average Nurarihyon No Mago viewer". Works are not made for a hypothetical "average person": they are made for target audiences, and that is something that must be taken into account at translations.

For example, if you are translating a children's anime for a saturday morning time slot, probably you should even translate "japanese words" like "wasabi" or "shuriken", but you could still keep others, like "ninja" or "dojo".

On the other hand, if you translate a samurai film, for theatre release, you could leave any of these in, but you might still have to translate "tsukkomi", or "ojou-sama", or "youkai" (somehow).

On the other hand, if you are making a fan-translation of an obscure manga for online downloading, you can safely leave in any of these as well, those people will understand them easily, along with "tsundere", "hikkikomori", or "keikaku". (Though they might get angry at the last one, and also at "baka" or "kawaii", and that's also something to take into account).

.....is there even a concept in English for "tsundere"? Hikikomori could maybe be translated as... "recluse"? Agree with your point completely though.

Not that doesn't take way too many words to spell out. As for Hikkikomori, its a culturally specific form of recluse. It does occur elsewhere, of course, but not to the level it does in Japan.

And there are words that sometime can be translated just fine, but at other times just don't work the same way in English.

Senpai and Kouhai, for example. In some settings, "Upperclassman" and "Underclassman" work just fine as translations, but we don't really have english equivalents for when they are used in non-school situations, or for when Senpai is appended as an honorific.

Its significant that Azusa calls Yui "Yui-senpai", and if you just drop it entirely, you completely lose an aspect of their relationship. Just like how you couldn't change "Azunyan" into just "Azusa" without missing the entire point.

I don't believe I was replying specifically to that situation, Ever; if that series were the only source of the concept, I would probably agree with you.

If the series isn't about youkai, but merely contains a few references to them tangentially, it'd probably be best to just call them monsters or ghosts something, depending on the context.

In such cases, what happens if later on in the anime, they make a distinction between yokai and monster and it becomes relevant to the story?

edited 7th Sep '11 9:21:43 PM by Signer

If the anime is already finished with no chance of a sequel, that's hardly a problem.