Amigo Ten wrote:I really don't see the point of keeping something in Japanese and then explaining it in a footnote, and then continuing to use the Japanese word. Just translate it. Same for attack names. Just translate them.
One of my classic example is then, well...
The author of the series is "Bird Mountain". Just translate it! Gotcha! Done!
We're translating, right? Well, then how do you reconcile that it's the author's name and then there's also the studio literally named "Bird Mountain"...?
It's a name, though, right? We don't "translate" names! How is a name (a formal, proper noun) different from an attack name, though? They're both just combos of syllables and intended-meanings to get across a larger idea, expressed as something distinct with a given name to set it apart from other, minor ideas.
That's why, for me, anything that's a proper noun I typically keep in its original language when "translating" it to English. I write out
Kienzan and such. You have crazy examples like "Kamehameha" which is a combination of Japanese and gibberish, so what do you do with it? Translate the Japanese part? "Kamehame-Wave/Blast"...? "Turtle-Hame-Wave/Blast"...? That's... awkward.
I don't really have an answer for you, in the end. These are the quirks you have to deal with when translating, and even your own consistency may sometimes be broken in order to get a translation/adaptation across. To sit back and say, "
No! I will never use honorifics in a translation!"... well, that just sounds painfully amateurish / based on little experience.
Maybe that will be the case in
something that you translate, but it probably won't universally cover every single last thing you do.