It's kinda a preference tbh. I prefer to translate it close to what is said mostly. But here I also didn't want to confuse people with saying Rurina-san, since the chartag is Nessa.
As a site, we decided to use the Western localized names where they were more common in English speaking fandoms (mostly games like Pokemon). We almost always leave honorific suffixes in place when translating as they can change the meaning and nuance of Japanese text. The Japanese here is calling her "Rurina", but the translator switched it to the localized "Nessa" to match the tags, and left the honorific in place. That all makes sense given the rules and patterns we set up here.
As a site, we decided to use the Western localized names where they were more common in English speaking fandoms (mostly games like Pokemon). We almost always leave honorific suffixes in place when translating as they can change the meaning and nuance of Japanese text. The Japanese here is calling her "Rurina", but the translator switched it to the localized "Nessa" to match the tags, and left the honorific in place. That all makes sense given the rules and patterns we set up here.
its still confusing, because it basically means half if not more are untranslated, but others are. This might lead to confusion the real name. It would be better to just auto direct the English names to the Japanese name tags. Since the japanese names are canon and americans come up with the worst names.
It would be better to just auto direct the English names to the Japanese name tags.
EN Pokemon character names were aliased to JP names for over a decade. This was widely disliked; Danbooru is an English-language website, where the overwhelming bulk of users' first exposure to the characters was through the localized games, so why shouldn't we use the names most users are likely to be familiar with? The aliases were ultimately reversed to be more accessible to the majority.
Feel free to re-open the discussion in topic #17160 if you feel that this change was a mistake, but you'd better have a more compelling reason than mere JP>EN elitism.
The aliases were ultimately reversed to be more accessible to the majority.
Well, partially. I'm not one to stubbornly go against the majority, but at the same time, I'm glad that I'm at least allowed to still search the characters by their japanese names (which is still me being stubborn, but let me have at least that). . . that said, if I want to go through Nanjamo or Kai's tags, I "can't", since the alias for their tags has yet to be made (whereas when the aliases were from EN to JP, they were made as quickly as possible, while JP to EN seems to be deemed "unnecessary").
Well, partially. I'm not one to stubbornly go against the majority, but at the same time, I'm glad that I'm at least allowed to still search the characters by their japanese names (which is still me being stubborn, but let me have at least that). . . that said, if I want to go through Nanjamo or Kai's tags, I "can't", since the alias for their tags has yet to be made (whereas when the aliases were from EN to JP, they were made as quickly as possible, while JP to EN seems to be deemed "unnecessary").
If you think there are useful aliases missing, you can submit them yourself in the forums. No one here is omniscient, what gets done is what crosses people's minds to get done. EN to JP was so reliable because the average person would never find them if only the JP names were options, so people were quick to submit those aliases. The reverse isn't true, so it gets overlooked because some people would rather complain that such aliases don't exist instead of actually proposing them in the forums.
Heh. Yeah, you right. I'm a very "passive" user, considering I only have 10 forum posts in the 13 years I use this site, but oh well, guess I'll get to it.
We generally keep the honorifics because almost all of them would translate to Ms. or Mr., and there are a lot of them with special nuances which are usually known to most manga and anime aficionados. If we conflated (-san, -chan, -kun, -sama, -dono, etc) all into "Ms."(we don't use honorifics in a similar way in English) then meaning gets lost in translation, and it's not uncommon for that information to be important to the story.
Leave a comment