It's just so weird to see mage when in the show he's clearly a wizard. I think that's a case where TVN is being too literal again.
Mage isn't a literal translation of mahoutsukai at all. The most literal possible translation of mahoutsukai is "magic-user," which translates each of the compound word's two morphemes separately. This translation is so literal that most Japanese-to-English dictionaries won't actually suggest it as a possible meaning. A typical range of meanings offered by a Japanese-to-English dictionary found online for mahoutsukai is "magician, wizard, sorceror, or witch."
For fun, I asked my friend who is a pro TL to tell me what options her electronic Japanese-to-English dictionary offers for mahoutsukai, and they are: "magician, sorceror, wizard, necromancer." The Japanese dictionary specifies that "mahoutsukai no obaasan" might be translated as "witch or sorceress."
Mage is, IMO, a perfectly good English synonym of the words that a typical dictionary would suggest for mahoutsukai. That said, it is a very non-literal choice, one that makes good use of English's flexibility as a language. I would hope people would stop blindly accepting the stereotype that TVN subs are necessarily more literal than other options after this.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in Japanese language.
You cannot offer this as an excuse, then make statements like "sempai is not a translatable word." When you make an assertion like that, you are asserting knowledge of how Japanese and English work as languages. Your statement is fair game for rebuttal from others . And it is vital that others rebut what you said, because it is
completely wrong.
Sempai is difficult to translate, especially in certain genres. Difficult and impossible are two
completely different things. I have never met a professional translator or Japanese professor who would agree that sempai is untranslatable. Even translators who prefer not to to translate honorifics usually concede that it's a stylistic meant either as a shortcut, or pandering to fans.
I just can't think of an English term that conveys the same meaning and at the same time just using their name seems unsatisfying because I can hear that that's not what they said. That's all.
That's because this is not how translation works. It is not about finding one word that always corresponds to the other word. English and Japanese are unrelated languages, so a majority of the words, phrases, idioms, and basic grammar rules of the two languages do not correspond directly. The art of translation between the two languages is about
compensating for that.
