so the translator is faced with a choice: do I just lose all this information for the sake of a translation that flows seamlessly, or am I willing to interrupt the flow in order to keep at least some of the information? Excellent way to put it. It's also probably even harder in subtitling, where everything is time-dependent, like a midway point between translation and interpretation...at least in a fic you can say the hell with it and put footnotes/endnotes in if needed.
do I regard throwing the reader slightly off keel as a positive advantage because it opens their mind to linguistic and cultural possibilities outside the scope of the target language? In a way I have a hard time being objective about this, because my reaction is usually "ooh! language stuff I can learn about!", so I'm not sure how more use of source-language words in fic would come off to someone who is more inclined to feel "stop throwing me out of the story with words I don't know."
I am saving Nirvana in Fire for a rainy day (it's high on my list of C-dramas to watch one day, but I'm a very slow and hesitant watcher of visual canons), so I don't know the details, but your logic makes sense to me, especially distinguishing between familiar titles used in canon and making them up out of the blue.
Many years ago I used to be in The Man from UNCLE fandom, and I've lost count of the number of fics I've read where "Illya Nickovetch" would be used as an affectionate mode of address, whereas in fact first name + patronymic is the equivalent of "Mr Kuryakin" in Russian Oh dear! I know just enough to pick that one up. I've occasionally just been too tempted to play with Chinese etc. to resist, and stuck in an author's note saying "please let me know if I've got it wrong..."
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Excellent way to put it. It's also probably even harder in subtitling, where everything is time-dependent, like a midway point between translation and interpretation...at least in a fic you can say the hell with it and put footnotes/endnotes in if needed.
do I regard throwing the reader slightly off keel as a positive advantage because it opens their mind to linguistic and cultural possibilities outside the scope of the target language?
In a way I have a hard time being objective about this, because my reaction is usually "ooh! language stuff I can learn about!", so I'm not sure how more use of source-language words in fic would come off to someone who is more inclined to feel "stop throwing me out of the story with words I don't know."
I am saving Nirvana in Fire for a rainy day (it's high on my list of C-dramas to watch one day, but I'm a very slow and hesitant watcher of visual canons), so I don't know the details, but your logic makes sense to me, especially distinguishing between familiar titles used in canon and making them up out of the blue.
Many years ago I used to be in The Man from UNCLE fandom, and I've lost count of the number of fics I've read where "Illya Nickovetch" would be used as an affectionate mode of address, whereas in fact first name + patronymic is the equivalent of "Mr Kuryakin" in Russian
Oh dear! I know just enough to pick that one up. I've occasionally just been too tempted to play with Chinese etc. to resist, and stuck in an author's note saying "please let me know if I've got it wrong..."