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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Honorifics
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley
We actually spent a good deal of the trying to figure out what we should write our column on today, and then our editor-in-chief sent us an e-mail asking us if we would like to respond to this article: http://www.tcj.com/?p=1884
We asked if there was a specific part or if we should respond to the whole thing, and he said “yes,” so we decided to just start writing and see what happens. So let's see...
I think we agree with the article as a whole. This might seem ironic coming from the “awesome awesome awesome translators” that Matt Thorn called out in the blog post that the article is responding to (yes, that was us; we apologize for our lack of flair and limited vocabularies), but yes, we do think that most manga translations need to be better. But to be fair, our experience with translations is mostly limited to anime subtitles (because we can compare them on the spot) and we've only read a few volumes of English translated manga, so we try not to comment too much on the state of the entire _manga_ industry.
So let's move on to something we have a more clearly defined opinion on: honorifics. Actually our strongest opinion on honorifics is that they ought to come up with a different term for them, because “honorifics” as a whole does not only refer to -san, -sensei, etc. And not only that, but -chan is actually not an honorific, because an honorific is used to show respect and social distance, while -chan is used to show closeness. Therefore -chan is the opposite of an honorific: a diminutive.
That aside, we tend to like to leave them in. This might be because one of the first things we translated was DN Angel, where the way Daisuke addresses Risa, Riku, and Satoshi, as opposed to the way Dark addresses Risa, Riku, and Satoshi, comes into play several times in the story and actually affects how things happen. But the rewriter took them out of the final English version, which we haven't read, so hopefully they got it to work anyway.
That brings up an important point that was mentioned by William Flanagan in the comments to Mr. Thorn's blog post: it's really not up to the translators whether or not honorifics get left in the dialogue. We just do what they tell us to. I think one of the companies we work for would let us get away with taking them out, but all the rest tell us to leave them in, so that's what we do. Whether or not they get taken out in the final version is out of our hands.
On the other hand, we can also see where leaving the honorifics in can be a bad thing. We think it's kind of weird when a series has a very Western-style fantasy setting and yet all the character's are using Japanese honorifics for everybody. That makes things especially tricky for something like Negima!, which starts out in a very Japanese setting, but then moves to somewhere where they're probably all speaking Latin or something very not-Japanese. We just decided that, since many of the characters we're focusing on are still very Japanese, and most of the readers would be used to the honorifics by now, it's okay to leave them in. But it's not entirely our call anyway.
We've also heard examples of English-dubbed anime where Japanese honorifics are used, and it definitely sounds a little off. They sound fine inside our own heads, because we're constantly dealing with the original Japanese. But when the actors say them like they're foreign words, then it's going to come across as a foreign word, and it's going to sound out of place. And of course, anyone new to anime or manga will think it sounds weird anyway.
I do think it's possible to engage new readers even with the honorifics--Fruits Basket is a good example of that. I also seem to remember our mother, who is by no stretch of the imagination interested in anime or manga, asking us what -chan means because it showed up in Memoirs of a Geisha, and we know tons of people have read that. So honorofics can't be completely off-putting.
So basically, our opinion on honorifics is this: If the setting is not Japan, it's probably better to come up with something else. If the setting is Japan, we don't see any problem with using them, especially because of their function in showing relationships between characters. It could be argued that there are ways of showing respect and the like without using honorifics, by choice of words, use (or lack) or contractions, etc. We tend to think that that's for dealing with polite language versus familiar language, and not with specific forms of address, but that's probably just an opinion thing.
This debate could probably go on forever, just like the whole subs versus dubs thing. But there's our two cents anyway.
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