Honorifics translation notes (updated post)
An Update to Honorifics
A year ago, we outlined how we’ve chosen to handle Japanese honorifics in our translations. With the addition of our new translator Neni, who is a fluent speaker in Japanese and has a far greater grasp on the nuance of honorifics, we’ve come to understand that honorifics are ultimately more relational than we had realized and cannot be translated directly 1:1 with replacements as we had been doing in the past.
For example, here’s an analysis of Ms. Accord’s use of honorifics. Ms. Accord refers to most individuals with the honorific -san. In the case of her students, she refers to Amitie, Klug, Raffina, and Lidelle with -san, but chooses to use -kun for Sig. At first glance, if you’re not as familiar with the situational uses of Japanese honorifics, you may draw the incorrect conclusion (as we had in the past) that Ms. Accord is treating Sig differently. After all, isn’t he the only one without -san, the higher level of respect, the equivalent of Mister/Miss?
Not so. It turns out that the odd one out is in fact Klug. The fact that Klug is referred to with -san and not -kun is the true anomaly here. And the reason for that is that gender influences honorific choices. For instance, it turns out that -kun is very common to use for individuals who are significantly younger but are in roughly the same profession as you. As an example, Risukuma refers to both Ringo and Maguro with -kun because they are all in the same club and are younger. To Risukuma, they are his juniors in the pursuit of science.
However, while men use -kun for women in these situations often, women rarely use this honorific between each other in a professional setting and default to -san instead (though in a casual setting among friends, they may refer to each other with -kun). Hence, Ms. Accord referring to Amitie, Raffina, and Lidelle with -san and Sig with -kun is what you should expect and signifies nothing in particular. Instead, Ms. Accord is treating Klug differently by referring to him with -san, because she knows that he wants to be treated as an adult. (As an added side note, using -kun is expected for male children but not for female children. And well, that’s not even getting into the intricacies of -kun when it comes to peers.)
There is really no way to capture the intricacies in how Ms. Accord’s use of -san carries different meanings for her students (who she sees as her juniors in a profession) and Ecolo with a blanket 1:1 correlation. So we’ve taken another look at our honorific translation patterns and have decided to approach this from a different angle: only including honorifics when they’re meant to signify something different from typical expectations.
After all, Puyo Puyo is set in a non-Japanese world with only the Suzuran trio being from Japan, so keeping honorifics when translating into English can sound unnatural. We were aware of this previously, but mistakenly thought that preserving honorifics regardless would be able to provide our readers with the contextual respect implied in how Japanese characters referred to each other. We’re aware that many find honorifics important, for example. Well if the above was any example at all, doing so actually leads to the incorrect interpretations (singling out Sig instead of Klug) — and these incorrect conclusions would have been drawn by most if we had simply left everything as “-san” as well, since most English speakers (our 20th Anniversary and Chronicle translator Ingu included) simply do not know what that is meant to indicate in respect, expectations, and distance.
So in summary, here’s our basic guidelines that will be implemented into the final version of the Chronicle patch, and our 20th 3DS patch (20th DS will be left alone as we are done working on that).
Accord: Will no longer refer to others with Miss or Mister, but will continue referring to Carbuncle as “the Carbuncle”, Ecolo as “Wanderer Ecolo” (we’re switching from Traveler to match the localized title more), and Satan as “Prince Satan”.
Lidelle: Will no longer use honorifics among her peers. Though she is polite, it is not so unexpected for girls to use -san that it would warrant a “Miss/Mister” for everyone. We will keep her “Mister” use for the animal-like characters however, as part of her use of -san for them is cutesy anthropomorphization.
Raffina: Similarly will drop honorifics among her peers for the stated reason (though it should be noted that she only ever used -san for girls, because she wanted to put on airs around them as her in-group, and boys are irrelevant to her). That said, we will keep “Ms.” for when she refers to Rulue to indicate a special kind of respect she has for her.
Feli: We’re no longer going to try to bend around to find a replacement for -senpai. It’s expected that she would call Lemres “-senpai” and turns out that unlike how -senpai is used in western fandom, it does not inherently carry any sort of respectful connotation outside of what’s expected. Though you might see some jokes in the English fandom about the -senpai honorific in terms of idolizing love, that connotation is not actually attached to the honorific itself but simply the age difference in Japanese. That said, we’ll still use “my fated one” when Feli is muttering to herself, since she is indeed obsessed and believes Lemres to be her fated love.
Ringo, Maguro, Risukuma: Will have no changes. The honorifics they used for each other were already dropped in our previous guidelines and/or changed to nicknames following the localization (Ris). They do not use honorifics for other characters, besides when Ringo calls Schezo “Mr. Creepy”.
Witch: And lastly, no changes here! Given the accent we’ve given her to suit her sales personality, the Miss/Mister continues to work here.
These are basic guidelines, but we’ll still have to negotiate what honorifics to use, if any, between characters of different spheres on a case-by-case basis. We hope this was informative and that you understand our approach and that translation is full of making decisions on how to best convey information to your target audience that will never be as simple as using a machine translation.