FAKKU Books: Honorifics

Introduction
The purpose of this topic is to try to explain and motivate FAKKU Book's stance on honorifics in our releases, namely why we are keeping the most common ones. I am writing this as the translator for (at this point in time) all of our upcoming releases, so while most of these opinions are my own, I am also doing this as a representative of FAKKU as a whole.

This text is going to be quite long, so I am going to split it up into two posts.

What are honorifics?
As the word implies, honorifics are terms that convey honor. Typically, they are used together with or in place of an individuals name to show respect—or a lack of respect. Examples from the English language would be “Mr. Jones,” or “Sir.” Unlike the English honorifics, which tend to be prefixes (“Mr.” is placed before “Jones”), Japanese honorifics are mostly suffixes (placed after the name).

Japanese honorifics
While titles (such as “Doctor,” or “Coach”) are common in both languages, Japanese also frequently uses a number of honorifics that only convey varying degrees of respect. The most common ones, which I am sure many of you are already familiar with, are san, sama, kun, and chan. During romanization (writing Japanese using the Latin alphabet), a common practice is to add a hyphen between the name and the honorific; a person named “Yamada” would be “Yamada-san.”

For a more in-dept explanation of each honorific, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article, but I will give you a short, simplified version—a tl;dr, if you will—here:

The basic san is neutral, used towards someone of equal status as yourself; sama exalts, used towards someone above you; kun and chan humbles or suggest intimacy, used towards someone below you, or a person close to you. While most honorifics are gender-neutral, kun is typically masculine, whereas chan is feminine, but there are many exceptions of this standard.

Translation theory lingo
The following is a short rundown of translation theory terms that I will use in this text.

Source/Target language refers to the language you translate from/to; in our case, Japanese is the source language, and English is the target language. Source/Target text is the original/resulting text that is being translated. Audience is the group that is intended to read, watch, etc., the translation.

Translating honorifics
When translating, there are basically three way to deal with honorifics: leave them all in, replace them all, or a combination of the two. Despite what some would suggest, I believe the first method is hardly ever practiced—if you consider titles honorifics, which they are—so it typically comes down to getting rid of them all, or keeping some of them.

The latter is rather straight forward; if it says “Yamada-san” in the source text, and the assumption is that the audience (the readers in our case) will understand the connotations of the term, “Yamada-san” is used in the target text as well. While it places some expectations on the audience, nothing is lost in translation, since it is essentially treated as a loan word.

Of course, if naturalization is of major importance, loan words are best avoided, meaning the method described in the previous paragraph is not an option. A liberal vs. a literal translation approach is a whole discussion in its own, so I will not go into that in greater details here, but I will touch upon it, given the nature of this section.

When it comes to titles, it is quite simple, since the same occupation or epithet often exists in both languages; “Yamada-hakase” can be translated as “Professor Yamada,” and “omawarisan” can be translated as “(Police) Officer.”

Step away from titles and it suddenly gets much more complicated, since it is rare to find a one-to-one correlation between two honorifics in two different languages. One has to get creative, and the context often dictates one's actions. If a person is referring to a higher-up in a company using san, one could translate this using Mr., but when referring to a classmate with whom you are not very close, one might remove the honorific altogether in the target text. Another example would be someone referring to a cat as “neko-chan,” and translating this as “cute little cat.”

While this should result in something that sounds more natural in the target language, there is a risk of losing certain elements in the translation. Alternatively, in one's efforts to convey the meaning, one might end up with something so forced that it still disrupts the flow of the dialogue.

The usage of honorifics—in anime, manga, etc.
A common argument from groups or individuals trying to motivate dropping honorifics is that honorifics simply are not that important. While I admit it is not the case in every story or series, I would argue that the use of honorifics often serves as a plot device in manga, anime, etc.

A typical example would be to indicate how a relationship changes over the course of a story; a person might call someone else Senpai at the beginning of a story, but eventually start using their name once they have grown closer. A common way to “translate” a term like Senpai is to just use the persons name in the target text, but that is obviously problematic if the source text decides to use this sort of plot device. In the case an ero-manga, this is a handy technique to use when the artist often only has a handful of pages to dedicate to any sort of story elements.

Another example would be to quickly establish current relations; if the main character refers to one of her friends using chan and another using san, she is probably much closer to the first one. One extreme example of this would be Madoka, where pretty much all the characters have different ways to address each other.

Media with or without original audio
Earlier this year, I played Lightning Returns—a game that was heavily localized. However, since it had the option to play with the original voices, I did not mind too much. I feel the same way when watching anime, and a common response I have come across when people complain about the lack of honorifics in a certain show is: “You can hear the honorifics, so it should not matter if we put them in the sub or not.” In general, I think any media that has both audio and subtitles allows you to be more liberal with your translation.

Of course, that category does not include manga. The reader of a manga only has the translated text, and you cannot tell what was removed or added compared to the source text—unless you go out of your way to check against the untranslated version, which is something I doubt the regular reader would do. This also means manga (read: ero-manga, since I cannot really speak for non-h) translations can get away with things that an anime typically would not; as long as it sounds correct—no grammatical errors, weird punctuations, etc.—most readers would assume that the translation is correct, even if a great portion of the dialogue was essentially made up.

If anime allows for liberties, I believe manga calls for a more literal approach. There is no backup in the form of original voices, so what you see is what you get. This goes for everything in the translation, but when it comes to honorifics, the argument “you can still hear them” does not work anymore when dealing with manga.

Summary
To summarize, our stance on honorifics is to keep the most common ones in our translations. They often (not always) serve an important role in the story, and attempts to localize them often come out awkward or result in things being left out in the target text. You only have the translated text in a manga, so anything left out is completely lost to the audience, and we do not want to take anything away from the readers.

We know our readership is not grandmothers who are completely oblivious to the existence of Japanese cartoons. A person who would read a porno manga should be familiar with regular manga or anime, and in that case, they should also be familiar with the most common honorifics.

Finally, these are the honorifics we consider common enough to keep in our releases:

Suffixes
san, sama, kun, chan, and variations of these (such as tan).

Standalone or suffixes
sensei, and senpai
(o)nii, and (o)nee, with or without any of the suffixes above (such as onii-san, or nee-chan).

One of the few manga I own as physical books (and that still hasn't seen the final volume released in English) is Ghost Hunt, and I really liked their approach. I would say they've done pretty much the same as you, but as an additional bonus, the books include a page explaining the honorifics (most importantly, also including the lack of an honorific in the explanations).

Quite insightful, thank you for providing a brief summary as to your perspective and philosophy as a translator. I really appreciate the transparency you and your team are allowing us with these releases, a benefit to being so close to†•and apart of†•the community that you're servicing.

If I may ask, you reference that the source language may use more complicated honorifics/titles here:



Can you perhaps provide examples of odd titles that you would not translate and the context in which they are used, for curiosity's sake?

If I had to hazard a guess, perhaps the likes of -senshu and -shi.

The former translates fine in terms of just words, but getting it to fit into a normal sentence is odd. It's basically an honorific for a player in a game. Using the NFL for example, since the opening game is tonight, it'd be like "Rodgers-senshu", but in English we'd never say "Player Rodgers" or anything like that.

Shi is like... a super formal version of San. Not sure of a better way to describe it, but that's how I've seen it used. It doesn't translate very well.

These are just a couple of the more memorable ones I remember coming across when I did fansubbing.

Not necessarily "more complicated," but simply just "more."

Titles (occupation, degree, etc.) usually have an equivalent term in both languages (granted it doesn't always work to just swap them, like then senshu example GBD brought up), but that's rarely the case for other honorifics that just express varying degrees of politeness. What I mean is that there's no one word that you can always use in place of chan for instance.

How are you going to handle cases like 母ちゃん/お母さん/お母様?

We'll have to draw the line somewhere, so in cases like that, Mom/Mother.

I see, very interesting for someone such as I who is a bit unaware of what goes on behind the curtain of translating. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experiences.

I just want to say I prefer this way of romanizing "先輩" as opposed to sempai.

I tend to stick with the actual spelling rather than naturalizations (loan word where you change the spelling to make it more natural in the target language), unless it's a well-established term (even to me, Toukyou looks weird compared to Tokyo). Sempai is how you pronounce it, but I doubt the people using it would spell Sensei as Sensee.

I only brought up the most common ones that you come across in almost any book. Anything else would have to be deal with on a case-by-case basis, but I imagine most other honorifics would be translated. In the case of X-hime, I'm almost certain we'd go with "Princess X."

I guess it would depend on how it's used. "Princess X" as a title, "X-hime" as a nickname?

Well, now that I think about it, there's the "Silent Princess" chapter in Renai Sample. There it's used as a nickname, and it was translated.

It's hard to come up with ironclad rules for something like this. Fortunately, we don't wanna do that—we wanna do whatever works best in the story we're currently working on. Again though, for a term like "hime," I think it would be translated in the majority of cases (both of your examples included).

Yeah, I realized a bit later that it could often as well be translated in case of nicknames. Renai Sample has just "Princess" with out her name, though, I still wonder which version would have been better if her name had been used as well.

thanks YQ. I agree with many of the points you put forth. Some honorifics can be very naturally translated without any loss of meaning like Professor Yamada. Other honorifics like san, chan, sama, are best (in my opinion) left as romanizations of the japanese honorifics rather than localizations. In this information era there's hardly an excuse for not being familiar with these common terms.

One of my greatest grievances with translations, whether fan-made or professional, is when a character is repeatedly referred to by specific standalone terms like senpai, etc. but their character's name ends up in the translation instead. Over several episodes & chapters the context of the interactions between the characters becomes very different than intended. I can really enjoy near-literal translations that are well styled in their target language. I don't mind if the phrases are not translated literally as long as idea and context remain the same.