[astrange]

If you think honorifics matter, this means only one thing: you don't speak Japanese.

They don't matter and are not what you're missing by reading a translation. (Similarly, it's not possible that a word "should not be translated". Words are just part of sentences.)

All the good old fansub translators have moved on simply by being old enough to need real jobs, but a lot of them are professional anime translators now.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Of course I don't speak japanese, I'm talking about fansubs, here, the purpose of those is to digest the media without knowing the language.

I definitely do not speak japanese, which is why it's important to me, some language joke literally don't transmit. In "Shakugan no Shana" there is literally a scene where the protagonist drops honorific and Shana talks about it. That section would need to be cut, or the joke would just not come through because I would have no idea what an honorific is. "Senpai" also has no direct translation in my mother language and it's a figure that doesn't really exist, there is an episode of Full Metal Panic that's around a character that's important to Kaname and it wouldn't come through the "why" if without knowing the meaning of the word. But the word just doesn't exist in Italian, so it was translated with a made-up sound "senpaia" in the official dub. Result was that nobody (we were teenagers at the time) had any idea of what it meant or why this was important.

There are various examples spread everywhere for this.

Teaching some words that do not translate is important, to convey some cultural aspects of japan that give context to the anime.

Which incidentally is the reason why I don't watch dubbed animes, because the voice acting is different. This might sound like a joke, but the high pitched screams of some female characters in anime just don't translate to my mother language and indeed when dubbed, the scream was mild at best.

[Nyan]

Generally the translator will find a way to work around the lack of a direct equivalent, trying to convey as much of the meaning as possible.

Now you may think that these workarounds cause some meaning loss, and you'd be correct. However, the problem with this line of thinking is that this isn't unique to honorifics - there's a tonne of other stuff in the Japanese language which has no English equivalent (I don't know Italian, so can't say much on that front), and non-Japanese speaking anime fans are often unaware of these because fansubs never introduced those concepts (for example, purpose of -desu/-masu which can be used to show respect, somewhat like honorifics).

The reality is that a lot of nuance gets lost in translation, with or without honorifics; unfortunately, if nuance is important to you, there's no substitute to learning the language. As such, people who think honorifics are highly important generally give me the impression of blissful ignorance (i.e. don't know what they don't know).

Of course, you're welcome to have your own preferences regarding translations. But having some hybrid of Japanese/English subtitle to portray slightly more nuance (whilst still missing out on a lot), can seem weird (e.g. why is this particular aspect exposed, but not something else?) and isn't necessarily objectively "better" than a translation that just sticks to English.

[astrange]

Yeah, a translation is always inaccurate because it's not in the original language. This is unavoidable, but the fact that you can hear some of it is missing does not mean that part is in any way what's changed the most in the translation.

As a related issue, Japanese has a lot of English words (wasei-eigo) and they /all/ mean completely different things than in English. But people wanting subtitles to sound like what's spoken causes translators to leave them in even though it makes the meaning wrong.

(When someone buys a "juice" from a vending machine they're buying a soft drink. Don't even ask what "feminist" means.)

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Unfortunately I disagree. Funny enough on Shakugan no Shana, there is a character that says -desu a lot and that not being translated and also explained to me when it first appeared, provided the ground to figure out a bit of the background. She also "expands" -desu in various ways, becoming essentially

I watched many animes in japanese with fansubs, as well as with translation, there is just too much lost and the professional subtitles applied did not provide enough context, like at all (in dvds you could watch italian dubs with subtitles).

Of course it could be a problem with the studio, but the experience has been pretty consistent.

The panorama might also have changed, who knows.

Oh, one glaring example is watching animes with subs on netflix was a terrible experience both in visual quality and subs, while the exact same anime from fansubs are really high quality, with amazing subs (all the stuff I described earlier), it just doesn't work.

[astrange]

> Funny enough on Shakugan no Shana, there is a character that says -desu a lot and that not being translated and also explained to me when it first appeared, provided the ground to figure out a bit of the background.

That's a joke. You shouldn't literally translate jokes because they won't funny; explaining jokes ruins them. The purpose of watching a TV show is to be entertained, not for you to learn grammar quirks only used by anime girls, so they should put new jokes there. You have not learned any useful information about Japan or their language by observing someone says desu a lot.

An amusing case when translating for people like this is you often have to translate honorifics into other honorifics, because they don't actually know all of them but just get upset when they don't see the few they do know. So -dono -me might get left out or shinobi/bushi changed to ninja/samurai.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

No, -desu was explained at the beginning of the episode, you have a whole 20 minutes (or more than 1 episode, I can't remember) to get to that point, so the joke worked perfectly fine as it was originally