Dec 08, 2022
I'm not a big fan of "creative liberty" localizations, so perhaps that's seeped through a little bit in my writing. I'm mainly used to fan translations that keep that kind of language in, so I'm more used to it. To me it's like forcing a square peg into a round hole- we don't call older siblings "Older Sister/Brother" in English, so trying to translate Onii-chan as something other than Onii-chan doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, you can have a little sister say "Bro" but it doesn't change that they're not speaking English so it's not natural to say that in the first place, because native English speakers would almost always use their sibling's name. Honorifics can convey a lot of subtle things about relationships that I feel like translations lose by trying to avoid them because it's "too weeby" or whatever. Like here, Kaede's address toward Haru is very intimate but Ryou's form of address he uses toward Ayame is rude and distant at the same time. There's a very fine line between a translation being so literal it's wooden and taking so many liberties that even I at an N5.5 can tell the subtitles don't match the voices. I guess my writing style unintentionally reflects my own preferred kind of translation.
And yes, I "localized" Guy Fieri into this chapter, so I am a massive hypocrite.