Jump to content

Okami

Members
  • Posts

    1795
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Blog Comments posted by Okami

  1. I'd say honorifics should be always dropped, when they bare no significance to the context of the story. It's a japanese thing and it should be left for japanese; there's literally no valid reason to keep them, aside from translator's whim, when all they add is nothing more than another layer of flavor to your moe.

    You are saying that there is no valid reason to keep them completely ignoring all the reasons people stayed above. Also otakuism being created by Japan has many Japanese things in it that are part of otakuism and shouldn't be changed.

  2. I think that honorifics are very important and that they can say a lot about how one character views another one as well as sometimes give you a better picture of characters personality and that they should practically never be drooped out of translation.

    You’re a culture-seeker who would like VNs to be translated with other culture-seekers in mind. That’s perfectly okay. Wear your otaku team jacket with pride. :)

    Honorifics contain content. I think we can all agree on that. The question we then need to ask ourselves is: How much of that content is both relevant and non-redundant? If 99.9% of honorific use in a VN is exactly what one would expect of society — people being generally polite to one another, people being deferential to their superiors, people treating little kids like little kids, etc. — then it’s not adding content; it’s repeating and reinforcing it.

    Same goes for the .1% of exceptions where honorific use becomes important. Let’s say a low-level employee decides to mouth off to his boss and, as part of that, drops all honorifics. Is that omission the only thing showing us that the employee is being a jackass, or are there a dozen other tells signifying the same thing — e.g., has he just ripped off his tie, swept the contents of his desk on the floor, and called his boss a dumb jerkface? If so, then the honorifics are just reinforcing what we already know. 

    To me, a story-seeker, if something in a translation ends up being both redundant and linguistically awkward, it’s a good candidate for the chopping block. Or I'll ask myself if there's a more natural way of capturing that same content in English. Perhaps most employees address the boss with a polite "Mr. Tanaka, sir..." But our employee marches right up and says, "Yo! Tanaka!"

    I think that you are forgetting one important thing, you here speak only about cases when it is obvious that one would use honorific and witch he would use, what I am speaking is about honorific that friends use between themselves, it is not that rare in anime, Manga and VNs for one character to refer to another with chan while the other one calls him back with san even true there is no clear reason for it other then their personalities and the way they see each other and for that there is no way for a reader to assume so and to know about it unless honorifics are there unless you ware to completely rewrite the way characters talk. Not always is there a way to correctly capture the content in English without loosing or changing even more of original content in a process and most of the time when you try to do so that is exactly what is going to happen, Translation of games like Hyper Dimension Neptunia are proof for that. Also majority of people who are into Otakuism prefer for those things like honorifics, and for people who don't understand those they are probably not going to understand many other things anyway regardless of translation.

×
×
  • Create New...