Darbury

HEB, which is the grocery store chain that practically rules most of the Texas grocery business, carries unpasteurized cheeses aplenty (at least in austin)... imported ones too.  They even make a type of fresh unpasteurized mozzarella that I love to put in my manicotti...

Kouryuu gave his take on the topic recently on ask.fm. Since he's translated quite a few nukige professionally, it should be an interesting perspective.

I can manage without the honorifics but when they change the names in subbed anime I just ASHFHASFSF. If someone calls a character by his/her last name please use it in subs. I don't want to see the first name there.

Out of curiousity, what would be your solution to characters referring to another character as senpai?  Let's say it's your standard moege that has one senpai route, and that is how the main character always refers to her.  Other characters generally refer to her as A-senpai or just senpai.  If you are removing honorifics, how would you deal with this situation?
Also, on another note - though I suppose it technically falls under the culture group - as someone who has a good listening comprehension of Japanese I find reading something with a lack of honorifics while I am still hearing them in the spoken Japanese dialogue a bit jarring.  But then again, that's one of the casualties of playing in the original Japanese and then going back and playing something in English - you're almost always going to find something that bugs you with the translation.
But all in all I agree with this article - there are absolutely some VNs I've played that just have absolutely no need for translated honorifics, especially if the VN is removed from the usual high school setting.
Also, on the subject of honorifics as plot points... the 'stock standard' routes of most high school based charage/moege is usually one kohai, one senpai, and two girls of the same age.  Obviously this changes if they are deliberately catering to guys liking older girls, in which case you might get ALL the routes being senpai characters.  But assuming it's a standard high school romcom, that's the usual setup you see.  Generally speaking, everyone knows why everyone is addressing someone by specific honorifics, but occasionally you do get into situations where honorifics become a plot point.  Ironically, honorifics tend to become a plot point when they are not there.  A character refusing to call someone senpai, or a senpai asking another character to call them just by their name, for a few examples.  Generally honorifics tend to become plot important when they're not being followed, more so than they are.  So that might also be a consideration as well.

I had no clue what Korean honorifics meant when I started reading scanlated Korean manhwa. I figured them out quickly enough without footnotes. I'd like to think I can assume the same of other readers.
Personally, I'd probably go insane if I tried to read something translated from Japanese without honorifics where they are appropriate, but I'm obviously biased here.

The blog post makes some great points that I hadn't considered before, especially the importance of setting for this decision. And the presence or lack of voice acting is also clearly important - when I can hear the honorifics, it's probably going to bother me a little bit if they're not there (though just a very little bit). If it's not voiced, I really won't care at all.
However, one thought: you can, in theory, avoid the choice altogether by providing both options and a configuration switch. If I recall correctly, the US MariMite DVD release subtitles actually have exactly this choice (subtitles with honorifics, or without). You're still left choosing a default, but there is an obvious answer there: optimize for the people who don't even understand the concept by stripping honorifics out, and to satisfy the people who will know and be upset if honorifics aren't there, tell them they can enable it.
That said, I'm well aware that this idea is likely to be laughed out of the room due to the high costs it incurs (I expect, to some extent, you'd end up editing and QAing two scripts, which would obviously suck), but nonetheless, you do have the option to make both sides happy by providing a choice. This is somewhat of a false dilemma.

Sometimes not using honorifics can screw up a dialog much later on in the story, for example there was a vn that almost by the end the characters were having a discussion on why the MC wasn't adding honorific to the heroine when he was addressing her, there is no way to fix that other than changing that entire dialog and making something up. Also honorifics are part of the culture in Japan so if you want to keep that intact and stay true to the meaning of what you are reading and translating then you should keep them.
Yes you are translating a vn for a western public that they might or might not understand or know everything about the Japan culture but if they are reading a vn (which is a Japanese creation) then they probably know about it and if they don't they should, why else would they be reading it?
 

I believe a few fan patches have a readme with a short gothrough of the various honorifics, so that's a possibility. Whether anyone except me actually reads them is anyone's guess.
Personally? I don't really care - but if I had to make a polarized choice either way I'd go the no-honorific way (naturally I chose the Fallout 4 option, though personally I'll be watching Psycho-Pass and reading Amairo instead.) I also think that your poll doesn't quite capture a potential "prefer it in only if it's somewhat plot relevant" position, which is more where I'd end up at. Keeping it is also less important in voiced dialogue, because I can probably pick it up from the Japanese anyway.
For an opinion less based on personal preference, I think it's best to leave them out so we can open up the medium to non-weebs. Leaving them in is generally the lazy choice, but given how lazy I am, I can't blame any translator for being the same.

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.

Haven't read everything but I'll partialy agree with Rooke's and Okami's first posts. Keep the honorifics but add translation notes, thousands of them if needed. However, games without voice acting don't really need them unless they're relevant somehow. OELVNs with honorifics are usually made by bad/unexperienced writers, a -san or a -senpai here and there are likely the last thing you'll cringe about when reading such work. Seriously, translation notes are your friends, you can keep part of the moon runes while also presenting newcomers with what they'll face should they choose to look for more stuff in japanese.
I like having the honorifics but unless they're needed somehow or the game has voice acting, I'd probably take them out. As an example of a game where the honorifics are kinda needed, let's take F/SN. If you already read it, chances are the word "Senpai" will remind you of Sakura and Shirou, mostly for the repetition I'll admit, but if you consider the cultural aspect of such thing (her calling him "Senpai" all the time), then maybe it's good that they didn't changed it to just "Shirou". In this case, we can feel that Sakura is a polite girl, it also tells us that Shirou is someone who's "more experienced" than her at something or simply that he's an year or more above her at school. Talking about that, the school setting is so frequent that leaving the honorifics is simply more practical. >.>

The only reason to leave them in is because taking them out makes certain situations an absolute pain in the ass. For example, when characters specifically mention the honorific, or go from calling someone A-san to just A, or A-kun/A-chan. For example, one scene in the game I'm editing has the main character meet a heroine for the first time, and the dialogue goes something like,
"Okay, Mizunose." 
"...No honorific?"
"Ah, sorry. I'm not really good with these things."
If you were to take out honorifics, you'd basically be forced to rewrite the entire dialogue here.
I'm sure people that translate literature more than likely just cut things like that out, as they probably do with every "Itadakimasu.", because they can. Though translations of things like VNs and anime are less at liberty with what they can and can't do, so it's more easier to just leave them in and expect the reader to understand them decently enough (which the vast majority of these people do). 
 

As I am a huge weeb, I will always keep my honorifics, Darbury-san. In fact, you could make a list of 1000 valid reasons on why I shouldn't use them, and I would still use them, because moon runes master race.

Leaving 'san' in is a perfectly fine translation philosophy only when the term and the cultural significance is explained in footnotes (or explained in the game.) If you'll note, more literal translations in literature are accompanied by hundreds of footnotes at the end, and more liberal translations in genre fiction usually aren't. This is because assuming the audience has prior knowledge of another culture while translating is an incredibly flawed translation philosophy. The idea that 'these words are incredibly common, the audience will know what they mean', which is an idea commonly floated, is weird logic that I don't subscribe to -> you translate for those who don't know the language, and thus during that process you don't assume that they already do, in fact, know the language.
If footnotes are incorporated, or explanations, sure, feel free to keep honorifics in. But if not, then under no situation is keeping honorifics a satisfactory translation philosophy and I really don't give a toss what culture seekers think on the matter. Because you're translating for ALL non-Japanese speakers, not just a select portion of them.

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.

>Is this an OELVN?
I chuckled... a bit. Thanks for making my day.

I'm on way too many cold meds right now to know if this post is real or a fever dream. In either case — bravo, good sir (or diphenhydramine-induced hallucination, as the case may be)! Bravo!

eh, you could call it a trademark word gag of hers
Like Monogatari girls (I think each and every single one of them has a catchphrase of some sort.)
I don't speak or read moonrunes but perhaps "Zurui" is more like "meanie" in most instances.
 

One thing I didn't see addressed: with what you know now, what would you have done differently? The two choices I see are:
- accept that this is the character's catchphrase, and stick with always using a consistent translation, but maybe change that one word (and maybe in that universe we'd be looking at a blog post about your "unfair" translation)
- given that seeing any single word repeated to that extent is going to be too jarring for English readers (apparently more so than for Japanese readers), use contextually-appropriate word choices instead
From the perspective of an English reader with poor, but non-zero, Japanese comprehension, I'd probably favor the former approach, but I expect the preference is heavily audience-dependent. If you assume a completely non-Japanese-speaking audience, the latter makes much more sense, but the audience for a VN translation probably leans towards people with a modicum of Japanese comprehension, who will be listening to the Japanese voice acting and mentally judging you. Compounding the problem here, I expect, is the Japanese tendency to use adjectives as entire statements; this is going to lead to a strange experience for English readers, regardless of the translation choice for that one word, unless you take substantial liberties with the translation. I haven't read KoiRizo (yet), so maybe that angle is nicely addressed already, but it certainly seems problematic, given the more literal translation which is common with fan translations.
Anyway, given your newly-endowed benefit of hindsight, how would you approach this tricky dilemma if you were facing it now?

(You're welcome.)

Oh dear, looks like I'm in for a tricky time. Gotten a bit into Umi's route, but not really close to finished considering there hasn't even been any sex yet. I'll try to keep an eye out for the supposedly strange word choices though, since Sango's route didn't seem to have any of that - and I want to see whether Rooke's theory is correct .

No, no, you are entirely mistaken. My interest in male genitals increases threefold per giant, blurry pixel.
As for the translation choice, I'm not a native, tricky sounds as English as any other word to me. Same goes for useless. If anything, I found it curious how it had been translated as "tricky", which I hadn't seen before, but that's about it.

*Slow claps*
I can see how zurui being used in every which way being problematic when it had become a character quirk.
It's one thing if you could swap them all out for more appropriate words to fit each situation, but of course you couldn't.
This may be getting into translation territory, but, I do think "unfair" or "that's not fair!" might have been enough to make do with in most of the situations.
MC is being nice. "That's not fair (why are you being so nice all of a sudden)".
MC is being a jerk. "That's not fair (I shouldn't have to deal with your idiocy)".
MC is eating. "That's not fair (you get to eat when I don't? maybe?)"
"Not fair, not fair not fair! That's NOT FAIR!"
......Just a thought.
*disclaimer - I haven't played Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort so my examples may be waaaay off

If you're confused about why things don't flow well, then just ask. No need to stand on my front porch and hurl insults.
You'll find I'm good like that.

Not really. The average fan-translation is garbage, and I'd say this was a lot better. Far from perfect, but you should probably stop getting so incredibly anal over a single word. 

You can always start your own translation and then do the editing yourself or gather a team to do it, if you don't like how others do their work you can easily fix that by doing it yourself and better, complaining about something that was giving to you for free is really easy but actually "eating the whole whale" as Darbury said is not that simple.