I usually find the translation of Chinese names to be pretty grating, even though the names' meanings almost always do have some significance to the story. For my tastes, it seems like a covert form of exoticism.
I'd be really interested to hear Rowland justify her decision to have Sano refer to himself as '-sama', because really, just no, unless the character in question is both conceited and bragging (often humorously; I can think of a couple instances of manga characters doing this immediately). I'm less bothered, I admit, by the persistence of yoriki and other untranslated words, because part of the reason people are reading the books is for the setting, and you have to give the people what they want, and sometimes an exact translation can be infelicitous in other ways--when I leave things untranslated in my manga scripts it's usually because providing explanatory notes at the end is much less awkward than an exact translation in the body of the text. And terms like "detective" have a lot of connotations in English-language literature, not all of which Rowland may want to evoke. ETA: Though the italics, and the inconsistency, I would probably also find annoying, and ultimately questionable.
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 05:25 am (UTC)I'd be really interested to hear Rowland justify her decision to have Sano refer to himself as '-sama', because really, just no, unless the character in question is both conceited and bragging (often humorously; I can think of a couple instances of manga characters doing this immediately). I'm less bothered, I admit, by the persistence of yoriki and other untranslated words, because part of the reason people are reading the books is for the setting, and you have to give the people what they want, and sometimes an exact translation can be infelicitous in other ways--when I leave things untranslated in my manga scripts it's usually because providing explanatory notes at the end is much less awkward than an exact translation in the body of the text. And terms like "detective" have a lot of connotations in English-language literature, not all of which Rowland may want to evoke. ETA: Though the italics, and the inconsistency, I would probably also find annoying, and ultimately questionable.