Dec 08, 2022
I know you're trying to make this seem like a translated light novel, and I haven't read that many translated light novels, so maybe I'm off base here, but I haven't read any light novels that kept Japanese honorifics. I don't know why this is just sticking out to me now, but "aniki" feels like it might be a bridge too far.
Like, it's probably more appropriate to leave it untranslated than honorifics or other terms you've left untranslated. "Nee-san" could fairly directly be "translated" to "sister" or "older sister", but "aniki" has implementations that "big bro" doesn't. Yet, if you look at professionally translated works, the translators have gone to heroic lengths to avoid it. I've seen "bro", "broski", "bruh", "sir", "my man", and probably a bunch others I forgot.
I guess the Yakuza series just leaves it as "aniki" now, because I remember a lot of people complaining about how that was "annoying."
This might seem strange coming from me. I wrote a whole trilogy of books where the characters try to speak with Japanese words as much as possible because they're too obsessed with subtitled anime, but I learned from that that there are a lot more people than you'd expect who exclusively watch their anime dubbed. Nothing had prepared them to handle puns like "feuxjousama".
