Manzai gag translation notes

So, I'm aware changes had to be made when translating honorifics, such as changing Arle's Kaa-kun to "Carby" or changing Lidelle's onii-sama/onee-sama to "Big Bro"/"Big Sis" in order to keep thing in-character, but were other instances where changes needed to be made aside from removing the honorific?

Our general format for honorifics:

-san: Mr. or Mister, Ms. or Miss depending on whether the character is speaking to someone of greater/lesser rank or age. 

For instance: When Raffina uses -san to address Amitie, it becomes Miss Amitie. When Raffina uses -san to address Rulue, it becomes Ms. Rulue. When Ms. Accord or Rulue address Raffina with -san, it becomes Miss Raffina. 

Note: Ecolo’s gender is canonically listed as ?, so when Ms. Accord says Ecolo-san we translate it to Traveler Ecolo. Carbuncle’s gender is also listed as ? in Fever 2, so just to be safe we don’t gender Carbuncle either (though it seems the Madou-era aligned Carbuncle more with male). When Ms. Accord says Carbuncle-san we translate it to the Carbuncle to refer to its mythical creature status.

-chan / -kun: If the name isn’t altered in any other way we generally just drop it. Kaa-kun becomes Carby (following Puyo Tetris) because Arle doesn’t say Kaabankuru-kun, in which case we would just write Carbuncle. Sometimes these honorifics convey a bit more information, like how Risukuma refers to both Ringo and Maguro with -kun to show that he thinks of them as part of his squad, but we don’t think it’s important enough for us to try to invent a bunch of nicknames.

-sensei: is translated to Teacher, or if part of a name like Accord-sensei then it becomes Ms. Accord as is customary to refer to your teachers in English. If you’re not aware, -sensei can actually refer to a variety of professions like doctors and lawyers. If confronted with that we would probably just replace it with their profession, like Doctor [Name] or Lawyer [Name].

and now for the most cursed honorific…

-senpai: This one is really hard because it conveys important information about character relationships that we want to preserve if possible. And well, Risukuma also insists that being a senpai is a vital part of his very being, so it’s not like we can really get around ever mentioning the word “upperclassman”. This is heavily a case-by-case basis.

Risukuma-senpai -> Following Puyo Tetris, this becomes Ris. They opted for a nickname. 

Lemres-senpai -> Said by Feli to refer to Lemres, probably because they attend the same school. We really struggled with this one but eventually went with Sir, but never before his name since that would make Lemres sound like a knight. It only appears when Feli is directly addressing Lemres, and not anywhere else. When she talks about her senpai and he’s not around, we leave it as Lemres if it’s clearer in the sentence or swap it with a term of endearment: my (dear) Lemres or my fated one, since she’s clearly stated before that she believes Lemres is fated to be with her. This, we hope, conveys the feeling of respect and awe she speaks of and to Lemres with.

Edit: These guidelines have since been revised. You can see our current decisions in this other post.