I'm back!

[alatus_nemeseos]

Hello, everyone! I finally have some time to sit down and write about what I've been up to these weeks! I have one Genshin entry in the backlog as well, but I'll get to that at a latter point since it's a very short log (I just did some anecdotes and that's it.)

First of all, regarding uni, the semester is getting tougher so I had to dedicate more time to studying. As it says in my profile, I'm a Translation student, but I think my translations skills are really lacking and since the only thing we do in classes is practice and correct the errors that come around, I've been trying to read books on theory of translation by myself. I understand that a practical approach is the better way to learn, but how am I supposed to improve if I don't know how to do things in the first place?

Sadly, this means that most of the time I dedicated to reading books for leisure has been replaced by academic books, but I have a lot of things in my backlog. I have some manga I still need to read (but not many); SVSSS, which I said I'd read after finishing MDZS, and a few classics I picked up on a book fair at the city centre. They were extremely cheap (3€ each!) so I got 4: Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Goethe's Faust, and Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I'd already read the first two in the list for my World Literature class in 11th Grade, but the copies I had were crusty photocopies and PDFs, and I wanted to get them physically! And as for the last two...

... I just got really into Mahoyaku/Promise of Wizard again! I've been a long time fan of the franchise, but I'd been dissatisfied by the event stories writing for the last two years, so I'd left it on stand-by. However, the anime showed visuals for a character I'd been wanting to see animated for AGES (all the way back in 2020...), and that reignited my passion and motivation to continue with the second part of its Main Story, which I never finished due to lack of translations... And wow, it was amazing! Tsushimi Bunta's writing is no joke, and so I've been paying more attention to Mahoyaku lately. The characters in this game are all based around classic books which you can see in their names, and Faust and Heathcliff are some of my favs, so I became curious about the stories they came from, as well. I might make a separate post on my thoughts on MS2, because I have a lot to say about it!

Other than that, I've been doing... okay, I think? My physical health is kinda meh, which I think it's partly because we've had weeks of rain, rain, and more rain — extremely uncommon in the south of Spain, as well as the change from winter to spring, which isn't particularly to my body's liking, lol. Also, Synthesizer V Pro 2 was released yesterday, so I've messing around with it, as well. I haven't talked much about it here, but I'm a huge vocal synth nerd, and this engine is pretty good, though I've already noticed a couple of bugs...

Thank you to everyone who commented in last entry! I missed you guys too :)

Comments

[huafeihua]

oooo it's kind of funny—the other day i was kind of spelunking around on the older side of the internet in search of fansubbing resources and stumbled across a forum thread locked in heated debate abt the classic question of "should honorifics be left in the subs?"
the argument was probably about what you'd expect out of 2010 weebs, complete with strawman slippery slope arguments and snobby elitists, but someone left a link to a really interesting blog post someone made refuting all the common arguments made by anti-honorific translators, and as i read it i found myself wondering what you'd have thought of what was being said in it LOL. i figured you were busy and decided not to bother you abt it, but since it seems you've caught a break for a moment i might as well bring it up.

the most interesting point to me on that blog post was the idea that japanese writers use honorifics as literary devices, since i'd never actually seen anyone put that to words, but once i read it i was like, "…yeah… YEAH, actually!! that makes sense!!! (and also nicely aligns with how i would use them when writing anime fanfiction set in japan)" and so i'm surprised i've never seen that posited more often during arguments. i would imagine that in a discussion on how to best translate an artwork, literary intent is something that should be frequently and seriously considered, after all.

anyway, nice to see you back!!! :D

[alatus_nemeseos]

Hello! I read through the post, and it was very interesting!

I don't think I've ever minded having honorifics in material translated from Japanese because, as the post said, it's something that's easily googleable or something authors sometimes explain in translations notes at the end of a volume or video (I recall examples from Spanish Vocaloid fansubs as well as others like the official English publishing of the Haikyuu! manga!). I also think they're often used as literary devices to explain how some characters feel about each other/what is their relationship/etc. This is something I've also seen often with personal pronouns! In an interview shortly after Promise of Wizard's release, the main writer said that they made one of the characters use "ore" because they wanted to give him a "rougher" side that would contrast with his usual gentle demeanor, which I think it's an example of this! Furthermore, there also tends to be contrast between the same pronoun just by the way they're written: 僕, ぼく and ボク all give off different vibes, don't they?

There's also the matter of the story setting. For something like a high school comedy set in Japan, it really makes sense that honorifics would be kept because, well, the story takes place in Japan. But I've also seen some translators choose not to use honorifics because of the setting not being analogous to the real world: again, a Promise of Wizard fan translation group (one of the most influential ones as well, so a lot of people followed their example) chose not to use honorifics because Mahoyaku takes place in a fictional fantasy world, only keeping nii-sama as an English equivalent of it wouldn't come across naturally. That being said, they didn't omit the honorifics, they simply replaced them to the best of their abilities, also considering the relationships between the characters: someone who is sort of an "uncle" figure is referred to as "mister"; other, who is a teacher, is also referred to as "teacher" by his students; a character who used to be the servant of another still can't shake off calling him "sir" or "lord", and so on.

It's interesting to see what people say about this topic in English-speaking circles and translations, because in Spanish (and at least in like the last 5 years; haven't interacted much with official translated media from before that time) honorifics get omitted/changed like 99% of the time, probably due to the vast difference between how politeness works in Japanese and in Spanish. I don't think it would much of an issue if they suddenly started including them in translations, but it would strike me as odd because it's barely done here. In Sasaki and Miyano, Sasaki originally calls Miyano "myaa-chan" or something like that, and I didn't know until I looked up stuff online for the series, because the Spanish translation of the manga kept it as "Miya", which would probably be a more natural-sounding way of making a nickname in Spanish.

I think that, since English is not my first language, I'm more willing to accept mixes of terms and the like than if it were in Spanish, because English already feels "foreign" in my mind (for the lack of a better word). In English, pronouns (as in "what pronouns do I use/want others to use for me) feel so... insignificant? to me because they're only used as the subject in most sentences/some gendered words, so I usually don't mind what people refer to me as. However, in Spanish, gender has more weight — it's present in almost every noun and adjective, so while the subject can be omitted in Spanish sentences because our verb tenses are distinct for first, second and third person (also taking into account singular and plural), you're constantly being referred to with a gender suffix, which is why I only use female pronouns for myself in Spanish. I doubt it's 1:1 to honorifics, but I still thought it was worth noting.

All in all, the solution the author of the blog gives of "making different subtitle tracks" is a pretty good option, but I'm afraid it wouldn't work in other media like manga or videogames, sadly. Either way, as long as you make it consistent, I think both are good, but I honestly don't know how I'd feel if I suddenly opened a manga volume published in Spain and saw honorifics lol — I'd probably brush it off and keep reading, but I'd be like "wow... this hasn't been done in a long Long time lol". I fear this reply was too long, but I indeed had a lot to say about it! Also, don't worry about sending things to me even if I seem busy — I'll just get to them at my own pace! Talking about translation is fun, even if I still don't think my opinions have a lot of weight to them because of inexperience.