Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation
well... why dont u just leave things as they are?
i dont think what jrpg players are not familiar with anime. u see, most of us have knowledge, helping to understand relationship between characters. why even bother with insanely adaptive translation?
i can understand -chan -san -sensei -kun -hime etc. without even thinking about translating those in english or my native lang
I've explained before, but basically it's because this is a game in a
Celtic setting. If it were in a Japanese setting, there's a stronger argument to leave honorifics and occasional Japanese words in place, because they could add to the translation. But they just make no sense in a Celtic setting, and in some ways I think they get in the way of the intent of things.
Basically, no-one really wants literal translations - if you go for literal translations, then a lot of things will get lost in the translation. Case in point: there's a joke about Branwen saying 性なる祠 (Sex Shrine) which Brigit hears as 聖なる祠 (Holy Shrine) because in Japanese both of these are said the same way. A literal translation makes no sense here (in English there's no way you could mistake the words), so I translated it in both cases to Fertility Shrine, because it's certainly possible to interpret that in both a dirty and an innocent way. So basically, a good translator shouldn't be doing a literal translation, but should be attempting to present the meaning of the original text in the new language. And in this case, my judgement is I got things wrong initially, and the nuances of a Celtic setting were being hampered by me including Japanese flavour to the text.
It's also pretty much irrelevant at this stage, because I've already done most of the editing.
In related news: now my translation has Brigit/Llywelyn call Gwendolyn "Gwendolyn" instead of what I said I was going to use - "Master". Basically, I tried swapping in Master and... it doesn't work. At best it makes Brigit sound like some kind of apprentice Igor. Also, to be honest... the use of a formal address between witches kind of flies in the face of what Gwendolyn says at the beginning, where she characterises witches as being light hearted and pretty casual so as not to fall into the type of mindset that leads to being a Wicked Witch. It also addresses another small issue, which is that Brigit is taught by two witches - Gwendolyn and Branwen - but in the Japanese, she only addresses Gwendolyn as Sensei. Small details like that bug me no end.