葉月 said:
No, no, NO.
Haha, I saw this coming the moment I wrote that. Personally, I think that representing おお as "oh" across the board (i.e. in notes and tags) would clear up pronunciation while still maintaining the one-to-one relationship between Japanese and English necessary for the tagging system, but that would require a shitload of aliases and it's really not that big of a deal, so I won't push the argument. (Just know that you have yourself to blame every time you hear someone pronounce 遠野 as "tune-oh", Hazuki.)
Fencedude said:
Seriously, you, as a translator, manage to understand how these interactions work. Why in the world do you think the rest of us can't as well?
Of course you can! You probably also understand that 好き ("suki") can encompass meanings of both "like" and "love"! You may not have been aware that 認める ("mitomeru"), in reference to people, has a meaning somewhere between "to acknowledge" and "to appreciate", with neither word quite doing the job perfectly (although "to recognize" can stand in well sometimes), but now that I've told you, I have no doubt that you understand! These are not terribly hard concepts! I said it before, but I'll be clearer this time: I do not do these things I do because I hate people who don't know Japanese and think they're dumb!
From the way people are arguing against this, you'd think this is A Few Good Men and I'm shouting "You can't handle the honorifics!" from the witness stand. All I'm doing with honorifics is the same thing I do with every other word I encounter: trying to find an accurate mapping from Japanese's semantic space to English's semantic space.
If I can't find such a mapping? I'll leave a translation note, or, in the case of honorifics, leave them in (possibly with a translation note on them as well)! To try to force a translation that doesn't use translation notes would be pandering to the lowest common denominator, and cultural whitewashing, and bad translation, and several other epithets!
But if I can find such a mapping? I'm going to use it! In part because of the problems with Danbooru users' Japanese knowledge I've mentioned before, but in part because all other things being equal (and that is what I mean by "an accurate mapping" -- one such that I believe that, within a very small tolerance, all other things are equal), an English word is better than a Japanese word! Even if a reader happens to understand perfectly well how 様 is used, if they're an Anglophone, "Lord" is going to strike them on a deeper level, because it's a word in the language they're fluent in! That's practically the definition of "fluency" in a language -- you understand the words in that language on a deeper level than you do the words of other languages, even if you have mastered said other language! To demand that a superior mapping not be used just because some readers will comprehend the meaning of the original, for want of a better word (and holy shit, do I sure want a better, less pejorative, less stupid-sounding word), is weeabooism.
And, having framed the argument in this way, I think I can restate the counterargument in different words: "Fuck you; assuming you know how I feel when I see '-sama' and 'Lord'! What right do you have to decide whether a given mapping to or from the original honorifics is better than just printing the original?" And my answer is: you let me make that decision for every other word in the Japanese language! I promise to be extra careful, so please, extend to me the same trust that you do for the rest of the document, and I will do my level best to ensure that no reader's enjoyment is diminished as a result of my fucking about, and that some may even find their experience enhanced!
