Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! - manga.exe
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Haterater
 Posts: 1727 |
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I wouldn't say that. It really depends on the translation and how they handle it. If done right, it makes it simple and easy for any reader for the translated language. Having to account for story and the character themselves, it shouldn't be too complex for most works out there.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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And yet honorifics are more complicated than just not having anything at all. Most of the time they can be dropped without incident. |
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Fencedude5609
 Posts: 5088 |
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No, Honorifics frequently say a lot about a character, and are frequently used as a shorthand to avoid unnecessary expositing about a character's personality. |
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rinmackie
 Posts: 1040 Location: in a van! down by the river! |
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I have Netflix and Neon Alley. While Netflix does have a fair amount of dubbed anime, they have a tendency to drop series after a while and they don't seem to have everything. Also, Viz titles on Netflix are subbed only. Neon Alley has the advantage of being dedicated to mostly anime and if successful, will have more in the future. Of course, I can watch anime on Netflix anytime but Neon Alley is planning to add a DVR service. My only concern about Neon Alley is their freezing up issues but I understand they are a new service so hopefully they will solve that problem. |
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superdry
 Posts: 1309 |
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I agree with this when watching anime subbed (I'm pretty neutral on including or no including honorifics in subs, though). While it is nice to see the honorifics in the the subs themselves, I can hear the characters speak just fine and get the jist of it if the honorifics are not in the subs. If it's a written work, might be better to include the honorifics. |
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hyojodoji
Posts: 586 |
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Professor Arthur Lindsay Sadler retained the honorific and translated '備前守殿' as 'Bizen-no-kami dono' in his translation of The Tale of the Heike. |
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Juno016
 Posts: 2406 |
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This is an interesting point, even if it has little to do with modern entertainment. When we make historical references, in English history books, to people from certain points of Japanese history, we use their "last name" first (i.e. Oda Nobunaga ), which has also been kept within translations of traditional Japanese literature. Today, we switch around the names of current and semi-recent figures to match the Western standard of naming. But what this means is that there are translations that, taking into account older materials, bring out the Japanese with the likelihood that the Western audience has no previous or background knowledge. I mean, I've yet to see a translation in today's media that doesn't call the master of tea, "Sen no Rikyuu" rather than take the stance we took with Emperor Shouwa and call him straight by his real name (Emperor Shouwa = Hirohito; Sen no Rikyuu = Sen Rikyuu). There's a difference in historical periods, but they've carried over and haven't taken a particularly different stance--and one might wonder whether or not that would have been possible with anime at some point, or if it could be possible in the future.
Not just with honorifics. It's a simple, but extremely important matter when a series (for instance, WISH, RG Veda, or Fruits Basket) has gender-neutral/hidden-gender characters and does not refer to them as specific genders in the original Japanese, but then it is necessary to give those characters genders in the English versions to refer to them with third-person pronouns. I mean, how else can you say "he/him" or "she/her" without giving away a specific gender? "They" is officially plural and cannot be grammatically used, and it would be awkward in some situations, anyway. "It" can be pretty derogatory to characters who are still meant to be quite "human." Even I, doing the closest possible literal translation of Japanese in my own translations to the point of sacrificing English fluidity at times, cannot find an alternative to solve this issue in the English language (which is a real issue when you consider real situations with people who have given up or were born to a specific sex). The translation note is the only thing to help me out. I still have to call Kyuubey a "him," even though he's... not necessarily a "him" (and has a definitive female voice actress to boot). Language is just filled with flaws. Someday, I'd like to create that gender-neutral third-person pronoun, if only for the sake of some of my friends who deal with these real issues. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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"They" is officially incorrect, but it's got centuries of use behind it. I also feel it might be interesting to note that all the third-person pronouns in Old English were pretty close - to the point that "him" was the dative pronoun for everything but feminine words(as for creating pronouns, you might consider raiding the first and second persons dual - like the radiation symbol, they're perfectly meaningless to most people so you can teach them what they mean).
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2242 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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As someone who has had to deal with purposefully gender ambiguous characters in the past I can attest to it being a giant pain.
It's not just bending the rules like using "They", it's sometimes resorting to awkward insertions of names instead of pronouns, or even rewriting some things a little to avoid getting trapped into something unavoidable. I find this happens the most with pets and "familiars" in anime. The gender of pets is very often unspecified, and people will use feminine honorifics even for male pets all the time, so there's few if any clues. Familiars and other mascot creatures are often completely cannon "genderless" (like Kyuubey). A good recent example I had to deal with was in Toriko, with (sort of spoiler but it's obvious from the outset) Cutler Melk. Here it's even more annoying because it's the characters within the show that mistake her gender for about 3 episodes. |
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