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Answerman - What's Wrong With Fan Translations?

Sariachan wrote:

Honorifics, once you learned what they means and all the subtle cultural stuff behind them, add a lot to the relationships between characters and how you perceive them.

If you know what they mean, why do you need them in the subtitles as well as the audio? If you know what it means, shouldn't you know what it means if you were to hear it even without reading it?

Ali07 wrote:

I just don't want to see many other "Nagato-san" to "Miss Nagato" subs. That was something I never got used to in The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan. Thankfully, YenPress' manga releases doesn't have that. And, while I hope that Funi changes that for their home release, I'll still buy the show...even if her teen friends refer to her as "Miss Nagato".

This is how Bandai translated the original series, though, so I suspect that Funimation will keep that for consistency(if they weren't already inclined to dump honoriffics entirely).

First of all, because I only learned them after watching anime for years. So, in general, I prefer when the honorifics are kept in the subtitles so that other people can learn about them, too.
Furthermore, if they are only spoken I could miss some.

We've become too used to "-kun" to just skim over it and use names, unless someone is deliberately trying to use "-chan" to be annoyingly cute or "-sensei" as part of school tradition, and then we leave it as is to make the point.
(It's not like the days of "the Fuu-ster" for "Fuu-chan" or "Lord Tenchi" for "Tenchi-sama".)

Sariachan wrote:

First of all, because I only learned them after watching anime for years. So, in general, I prefer when the honorifics are kept in the subtitles so that other people can learn about them, too. Furthermore, if they are only spoken I could miss some.

I think some people are making out the honorifics to be more important than they actually are.

Yes, they have meaning and provide insight on the relationship between characters, but without them, you're not really losing much.

I remember reading old copies of Viz's translation of Maison Ikkoku, and I still enjoyed the story. In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I later purchased the entire manga series in Japanese. I'm not fluent in Japanese, I can maybe read a third of it without reaching for a dictionary, but I did notice that Kyoko refers to Yusaku as "Godai" (surname) throughout most of the series. IIRC, in Viz's translation, she often called him "Yusaku". I think later in the series they switched to Godai. I think the earlier volumes also had Yusaku call Kyoko "Kyoko", but later changed to "manager" (in the original Japanese, I believe he always called her "karinin-san").

I still don't think that detracted from the story, or that anything significant was lost.

Edit: also, there was one chapter where honorifics played a greater role, involving a kitten named "Kyoko-chan", which was translated as "Kyoko Baby". Despite not using the Japanese honorific, they still managed to get the meaning of the story out.