However, when I first started watching Japanese shows and at the time didn't have any prior knowledge to Japanese, I really appreciated the subs that did leave little things like the honorifics untranslated and also explained what the word meant.
Okay. This makes sense. One thing I feel I should tell you, though.
The way characters in fiction, especially very exaggerated fiction like Sentai, use honorifics is generally not anything applicable in day-to-day life. That is, if you ever want to go to Japan and address actual Japanese persons, you need to forget everything you've learned about honorific usage from watching kids' shows and relearn it from scratch.
You may wonder: "If these shows are for kids, why don't they use honorifics accurately?" Well, part of it is that small Japanese children are taught which honorifics to use in "real" situations from a very young age, so they accept that characters in fiction can behave differently because they're not real. It's similar to how most three-year-olds can watch Tom & Jerry while understanding that their real cat does not behave that way.
Another part of it is Japan's literary tradition. Popular entertainment throughout Japanese history has generally not concerned itself with realism. Instead, the tradition is that characters in fiction speak and behave in formalized, unrealistic ways that have certain significance to the audience based on their understandings of how people
actually act. It's part of what can make translating even Japanese kids' shows fairly complicated.
If you're going to insist on teaching yourself Japanese from pulp TV subtitles, please keep in mind that at some point you will have to forget everything you think you know in order to learn actual day-to-day use rules. People who don't do this have a tendency to go to Japan (or even Japanese classes) and end up saying and doing things that humiliate themselves.
Granted this wasn't a sub, but what about in the Bond movie You Only Live Twice where Bond is repeatedly referred to as "san" instead of "Mister"?
This is actually an entirely separate issue, governed by the style rules for incorporating foreign words into original English fiction rather than translation best practices. It's worth discussing, though.
At the time this particular Bond film was made, American pop culture was going through a sort of recurring fad for adventure stories that emphasized exotic locations by throwing in foreign words and phrases. Chris Claremont's run on X-Men isn't too long after this film was made and it had virtually every one of the "foreign" characters pepper their dialog with words from their native language.
This fad seems to come and go every few decades. You can find evidence of it going back hundreds of years. It is a writing practice that has also, for hundreds of years, been criticized as cheesy and awful by authors and editors. It is warned against in Strunk & White's 1919 writer's guide The Elements of Style (which is still in use today) and famously criticized as pretentious and fatuous in some of world traveler T.H. White's essays.
The main arguments against this are as follows:
1.
It is pretentious and insulting to the reader, because there is no reason to use foreign words when good English equivalents exist save to show off that you know them. T.H. White particularly harped on this, as he had a particular distaste for "scholars" who had to use gratuitous Latin and Greek phrases constantly, or who had to use poorly-pronounced Chinese to remind you that they'd been to the Orient.
2.
It results in ridiculous and unrealistic behavior by characters, since most authors want to reference languages they aren't fluent in. So if they have characters using foreign words, they tend to pick simple ones they can learn out of a dictionary... words where it would be very easy for a foreigner to learn their proper English equivalents! Claremont's X-Men run is particularly criticized for this, where he had characters using foreign substitutes for basic words like "good" and "hello." Authors do this because it's easy for audiences to figure out through context what simple foreign words mean when they're thrown into the middle of an English sentence. When real-world ESL speakers fall back on speaking in their native language, it's usually because they want to express something
complex that they don't know the English for offhand. This phenomena is also why most foreign loan words into English describe fairly specific phenomena (tsunami) or fairly complex ones (zeitgeist).
3. It can result in use of language so incorrect that it is insulting to persons who speak the language, and misleading to those who do not. The Bond film you reference would be guilty of this one and is frequently criticized for it. At the time this film was made, no Japanese person would be likely to use any Japanese honorific to address a foreigner, especially one who didn't live in the country. It would be considered impolite and therefore possibly insulting. Japanese who regularly dealt with foreigners would've learned the basic honorifics of the
foreigner's native language. So in the Bond film you're referencing, the Japanese characters probably should've been addressing him as Mister Bond (unless they were trying to be rude). If they didn't, it's probably because the author wanted to throw in some foreign words to make the script sound more exotic.
Was the movie pandering to "weaboos"?
Yes, consciously so. Throughout history, Westerners go through cycles of what can only be called weeaboo-ism, being superficially fascinated by Japanese things. You can trace this back as early as the first Japanese porcelain that was shipped into France in the early 18th century. When the French began to make their own porcelain, they initially didn't decorate it with art done in a French style or depicting French things. Instead, they imitated Japanese styles as closely as they could!
At the time You Only Live Twice was made, the West was at the beginning of a fad for "Japanese" entertainment, driven by a superficial fascination with samurai and ninja pulps, as well as monster movies. Before the end of the next few decades the West saw the first dubbed anime on TV, Ultraman aired dubbed in syndication, theatrical releases of monster movies, and some of the earliest subtitling of chanbara films (which in turn lead to the West's discovery of Akira Kurosawa).
Other entertainment that comes out around the same time, exploiting the Western man's fascination with Japan in the same way, include: James Clavell's novel Shogun, basically everything written about the Marvel Comics character Wolverine hanging around in Japan, Daredevil fighting ninjas courtesy Frank Miller, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Eric Van Lustbader's The Ninja, and Piers Anthony's Jason Striker series.
Perhaps the ultimate work of Western Japan-lust wish fulfillment written in this period is Joel Rosenberg's Not For Glory, a space opera in which, in the future, Japanese people and Jews have intermarried long enough to create a planet populated by a spacefaring tribe of Japanese Jews who are defended by badass kabbalic space ninjas.
You may not be surprised to learn the author is Jewish.
These works aren't necessarily bad, but they're by design exploitative and often poorly-researched. They're meant for people who don't know anything about Japan and don't care enough to go read books describing actual Japanese history or politics. They definitely wouldn't be considered any sort of serious fiction or reasonable portrayals of Japan, they're mostly meant as light entertainment.
Shogun's author changed all the names of the historical figures he wrote about and included anachronisms on purpose, for instance, because he wanted readers to react to his Japan as an exotic place of fantasy rather than as a real foreign country. Of course, the novel ended up being actually marketed as a "Novel of Japan," sold 15 million copies, and produced a confused generation of wannabe students who didn't understand that there never really was a Shogun Toranaga.
Can we just ban these threads or just have a sticky guide to translation terms?
It makes no sense to ban threads for being repetitive. If we did that, all of the talk ups would be banned, because they're mostly people saying the same stuff week after week. New users come into the forum all the time and your 27th thread about this might be their first.
Hmm, that brings up something I've been wondering.
How do the translaters handle it when a character changes the way they address another indicating a change in their relationship?
One technique I've seen used is to have Character A refer to Character B on a last-name basis early in the story, then switch to a first-name basis when the characters become more friendly. I've also seen a trick done where a character constantly address another as Mister or Miss, then drops the title and goes to a first-name basis at the point of the change.
Basically, these moments aren't hard to translate around provided you get to read/watch the entire story before you begin work on the translation. Obviously, these moments can turn into problems for translators of weekly projects who don't know what to expect until an episode airs.
