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nnozomiI’ve been meaning to put up something about translation, and lately I was talking with china_shop about titles in Guardian fic (titles for people, that is, not fics) and with nineveh_uk and azdak about weird subtitle translations, so I figure now is the time. Come and talk to me about problems (or solutions) with subtitles in C- or K- or J-dramas, and how you deal with, or prefer writers to deal with, similar issues in fic. (Not necessarily limited to Chinese/Korean/Japanese etc.! Anything goes.)
I think what I do in fic, and would prefer in other people’s fic and in subtitles, is to translate when I feel like it can be done without losing anything, and otherwise to romanize—Momokan to Coach Momo, Hei Pao Shi to the Black-Cloaked Envoy and so on, versus Chu-ge, Chiaki-sempai, Abe-kun, Xiao Bai (also known as Si-mei, but that’s harder, see below). (I turned on the English subtitles for the Lost Tomb thing to check a particular line, and was somewhat horrified to find “Xiao San-ye” translated as “Mr. Third Junior.” Which is…not actually wrong, but irredeemably clunky, and it’s a shame because that particular nickname/title is an amazing shorthand for Wu Xie’s local prestige/authority, his…to-be-protectedness?, and his connection to Sanshu.)
The sibling words are a headache all their own, especially in Chinese, somewhat in Korean, slightly in Japanese. Even though period/fantasy gives you some leeway, Wei Wuxian might tease Lan Wangji with “Lan-er-gege” but no one will take him seriously if he starts saying “Second Big Brother Lan”; Lan Wangji’s own register is so formal that he could probably get away with calling Lan Xichen “Brother” or “Older Brother” in English, but it still sounds a lot more natural to me for him to say “Xiongzhang.” And that’s before you get into “didi” and “da-ge” and “a-jie” and so on and so forth, and those are people who are related, more or less. Guo Changcheng is characterized in part by his tendency to call his coworkers “ge” and “jie,” but if there’s a way to do that in English, I sure don’t know it. (Even in Japanese, he would quite possibly use “sempai” but he wouldn’t use “oniisan” or “aneki” or whatever in the workplace; not a pan-Northeast-Asian thing.)
Honorific language, pronoun use, dialects. The classic thing in Guardian is in the bomb episode when Zhao Yunlan, annoyed with Shen Wei (for absolutely justifiable reasons, granted), nastily calls him the honorific 您 instead of the usual 你 second person, making Shen Wei protest “Don’t be that way.” There must be a lot of other incidences of this, probably even more in Korean and Japanese, but I can't think of any just now, ideas?
Translation into Japanese etc.—I always like seeing what people do with the pronouns. (My go-to explanation for non-Japanese speakers about the difference between the two male first-person pronouns “boku” and “ore” is “Luke Skywalker versus Han Solo,” and it usually gets through.) For readers of The Westing Game, in the scene where 17-year-old Theo is giving a semi-formal speech, he says “I’d like to explain why my partner and me…my partner and I…called this meeting,” and the Japanese translation has him say 俺、じゃなくて僕… switching from “ore,” teenage casual speech, to “boku,” more formal and polite. Brilliant. Years and years ago I read a Japanese translation of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest in which F’lar uses 私 in a formal meeting, 僕 to Lessa and 俺 to his dragon; hat off to translator.
(Almost completely unrelated: I saw an Untamed fic summary recently about how Nie Huaisang basically invents the fantasy-ancient-China makeup industry, and I am so regretful that the author didn’t choose to call it “The Rouge Cultivator.”)
Tell me how you think about all this! Any languages, any context.
I think what I do in fic, and would prefer in other people’s fic and in subtitles, is to translate when I feel like it can be done without losing anything, and otherwise to romanize—Momokan to Coach Momo, Hei Pao Shi to the Black-Cloaked Envoy and so on, versus Chu-ge, Chiaki-sempai, Abe-kun, Xiao Bai (also known as Si-mei, but that’s harder, see below). (I turned on the English subtitles for the Lost Tomb thing to check a particular line, and was somewhat horrified to find “Xiao San-ye” translated as “Mr. Third Junior.” Which is…not actually wrong, but irredeemably clunky, and it’s a shame because that particular nickname/title is an amazing shorthand for Wu Xie’s local prestige/authority, his…to-be-protectedness?, and his connection to Sanshu.)
The sibling words are a headache all their own, especially in Chinese, somewhat in Korean, slightly in Japanese. Even though period/fantasy gives you some leeway, Wei Wuxian might tease Lan Wangji with “Lan-er-gege” but no one will take him seriously if he starts saying “Second Big Brother Lan”; Lan Wangji’s own register is so formal that he could probably get away with calling Lan Xichen “Brother” or “Older Brother” in English, but it still sounds a lot more natural to me for him to say “Xiongzhang.” And that’s before you get into “didi” and “da-ge” and “a-jie” and so on and so forth, and those are people who are related, more or less. Guo Changcheng is characterized in part by his tendency to call his coworkers “ge” and “jie,” but if there’s a way to do that in English, I sure don’t know it. (Even in Japanese, he would quite possibly use “sempai” but he wouldn’t use “oniisan” or “aneki” or whatever in the workplace; not a pan-Northeast-Asian thing.)
Honorific language, pronoun use, dialects. The classic thing in Guardian is in the bomb episode when Zhao Yunlan, annoyed with Shen Wei (for absolutely justifiable reasons, granted), nastily calls him the honorific 您 instead of the usual 你 second person, making Shen Wei protest “Don’t be that way.” There must be a lot of other incidences of this, probably even more in Korean and Japanese, but I can't think of any just now, ideas?
Translation into Japanese etc.—I always like seeing what people do with the pronouns. (My go-to explanation for non-Japanese speakers about the difference between the two male first-person pronouns “boku” and “ore” is “Luke Skywalker versus Han Solo,” and it usually gets through.) For readers of The Westing Game, in the scene where 17-year-old Theo is giving a semi-formal speech, he says “I’d like to explain why my partner and me…my partner and I…called this meeting,” and the Japanese translation has him say 俺、じゃなくて僕… switching from “ore,” teenage casual speech, to “boku,” more formal and polite. Brilliant. Years and years ago I read a Japanese translation of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest in which F’lar uses 私 in a formal meeting, 僕 to Lessa and 俺 to his dragon; hat off to translator.
(Almost completely unrelated: I saw an Untamed fic summary recently about how Nie Huaisang basically invents the fantasy-ancient-China makeup industry, and I am so regretful that the author didn’t choose to call it “The Rouge Cultivator.”)
Tell me how you think about all this! Any languages, any context.
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Date: 2020-11-15 09:07 am (UTC)You're an absolute genius.
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Date: 2020-11-15 09:07 am (UTC)Black-Cloaked Envoy works okay for me in narration,[1] but once I get into dialogue, I usually want a way to distinguish between Hei Pao Shi and Hei Lao-ge that doesn't involve "bro" -- though, granted, now I come to think of it, I could probably use Lord Hei Pao Shi rather than Hei Pao Shi Daren. (Note to self!) And once I'm using Hei Lao-ge, it seems wrong to alternate that with Black-Cloaked Envoy, at least in dialogue. If you know what I mean?
Similarly, it's useful to use -ge so you can distinguish it from -xiong. I love all the nuance and inferred meaning behind the different address forms (even if I only understand a fraction of them), and translation tends to flatten.
ETA: [1] But even in narration, I find Black-Cloaked Envoy a little unwieldy. It doesn't flow in English, the way it does in Chinese, you know? Hei Pao Shi, which is in the same form as a name (at least wrt its three-characterness) becomes this clunky, hard to pronounce collection of consonant clusters: Black-cloaked. (Imagine transliterating that into Korean! 블래크 클로크드!) Which is why I keep abbreviating it to the Envoy, even though that's less accurate and inappropriately informal.
And as I said to you the other day, I keep thinking about -- *checks* yes,
I also think that in fandom we can get away with more transliterations because we're all familiar with and share the same source material (the various versions of the subs, notwithstanding). If you were writing original fic for a general audience, and you had Hei Pao Shi as a character, there'd be a lot more implicit pressure to translate, because otherwise you'd need a glossary. But in fanfic, the reader brings a lot of tacit knowledge about/from the source to the fic, even for those of us who don't know a single character of Chinese. And using those Chinese address terms like lao- and xiao- is a useful reminder that this is a Chinese drama fandom when, in this corner of online fandom, the gravitational pull of North American norms can be mighty. :-)
Also, separate point, I'm most likely to use "my Black-Cloaked Friend" or "his younger brother" (rather than Didi) in fanfic when I'm trying to obscure my identity for the purposes of anon periods in exchanges. Heh.
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Date: 2020-11-15 09:23 am (UTC)I remember reading a discussion about a character in a manga (I think Atobe in Prince of Tennis, one of those fandoms I only encountered via fic) who used “ore-sama”, which was described as “thinking you were all that and a bag of chips”, which I loved as an explanation :D
If I’m reading something translated from Japanese that’s set in Japan I do like having pronouns, but I’m not sure I notice if they aren’t there, especially if it’s another setting.
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Date: 2020-11-15 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-15 02:14 pm (UTC)I like using "Black Cloaked Envoy" because it feels like a title, but when it comes to ZYL's unique variations - well, then I'm back at "Hei Lao-ge" because I see no way to translate that and keep the flavor.
I wish English had formal you versus informal you - my own language has that, and I really miss it. It would give so much more intimacy when a character switches from one to the other...
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Date: 2020-11-15 04:03 pm (UTC)I think what I do in fic, and would prefer in other people’s fic and in subtitles, is to translate when I feel like it can be done without losing anything, and otherwise to romanize
Yes, totally agreed! Not a clear line at all, alas - when do you start losing something? how much loss is acceptable? Hell if I know. Like, I'm totally for "Black-Cloaked Envoy", except when I'm not, and I still don't know when exactly I use Hei Pao Shi instead. Or when I go for something like "Lord Envoy" as a form of address, which doesn't even have a full equivalent in canon, but just works so well in English! Ugh.
and was somewhat horrified to find “Xiao San-ye” translated as “Mr. Third Junior.” Which is…not actually wrong, but irredeemably clunky
Right???? Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin". (Which in turn is already a transcription of his name - 起灵, Qiling, not Qilin - that I'm not sure I'm on board with ...)
Totally agreed on the sibling words, and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless. "Older martial sister"? No, thanks. But it matters that that's what Wei Wuxian calls her, and shows his position in that family. (And is part of the reason, no doubt, why people don't take Jiang Yanli seriously when she claims him as her didi.)
I'm not sure even about completely (non-clunkily) translatable titles/forms of address either. I mean, in German translations we often use "Mr" etc. when something is set in the US/UK, and English texts use "Monsieur/Madame" sometimes, etc., and I don't know where to draw the line. So I go by what feels right, which may change from one day or text to the next. *g*
The classic thing in Guardian is in the bomb episode when Zhao Yunlan, annoyed with Shen Wei (for absolutely justifiable reasons, granted), nastily calls him the honorific 您 instead of the usual 你 second person
That is such a great detail in a great scene! And so difficult to translate.
Like, German has formal and informal "you", but you couldn't map those onto the Chinese pronouns, and my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original.
and I am so regretful that the author didn’t choose to call it “The Rouge Cultivator.”
OMG!!!!! :D :D :D
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Date: 2020-11-15 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-15 06:01 pm (UTC)So, on one hand, this is one more level that the German language can use to get the different addresses in Chinese across (the easiest example is 您 vs. 你 but of course there are a lot more with the -ge's and the -jie's etc).
On the other hand, the team documents for the German viki teams are full of lists like "this person addresses these persons as X" "this person addresses other persons as Y". Which is a pain.
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Date: 2020-11-15 08:32 pm (UTC)I forget what we agreed on for Mr. Third Junior... I think it was Third Young Master. Still clunky, but we couldn't come up with anything better.
The viki subs at least have some of that, but not all, sadly.
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Date: 2020-11-16 04:58 am (UTC)No, that's fascinating! That's like Korean having different formality levels, and I'm so curious to know how they translated Guardian wrt who's being polite/casual with whom, when. The question of importing/creating information by necessity, to make it make sense. It's like the flipside of translating into English and losing a bunch of nuance.
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Date: 2020-11-16 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 09:29 am (UTC)Excellent! I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone use it unironically in real life, because wow would people side-eye you; maybe as a joke once in a while.
(I can occasionally tell that my husband is getting around to asking a favor when he switches from "ore" to "boku"...)
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Date: 2020-11-16 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 09:41 am (UTC)but what I want is that nuance. I love hearing WX's uncle call him "Xiao Xie" and the subs don't even mention it, sigh.
Yes! I mean, the Lost Tomb thing is probably a subtitler's nightmare because it's all nicknames (I'm afraid to wonder what they do with "Xiazi")--and nicknames of nicknames! Huo Daofu is "Xiao Huo" to Wu Xie and "Dr. Youtiao" to Pangzi (yet another one--"Youtiao Yisheng"? "Dr. Fried Dough"? oy). Pangzi himself gets called Pang-ge and Pang-shu and Pang-ye and si-Pangzi and once in a while Wang Yueban depending on who's talking to him in what context, and Wu Xie is Tianzhen and Xiao Xie and Xiao San-ye (and Pangzi tries to get Xiao Bai to call them er-ge and san-ge, only she doesn't bite), and...a pain to reflect in English but SO WORTH IT.
I like using "Black Cloaked Envoy" because it feels like a title, but when it comes to ZYL's unique variations - well, then I'm back at "Hei Lao-ge" because I see no way to translate that and keep the flavor.
Yes, I think I've basically avoided "Hei Lao-ge" because it's so hard that way--"Brother Black" a couple of times, although that sounds like a monk...
I wish English had formal you versus informal you - my own language has that, and I really miss it. It would give so much more intimacy when a character switches from one to the other...
you know what, I did not know English wasn't your first language. Now I'm curious about which version of the formal/informal divide you have. (Also I was reminded of something from the Japanese writer I used to study, Chujo Yuriko, writing in 1929 to her Russian-speaking girlfriend: "You know, I hear people in London say “you” to anyone, no matter how intimate they may be, as if they were reciting something by heart; I miss [Russian informal] t’i or [Japanese informal] omae.")
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Date: 2020-11-16 09:47 am (UTC)are you kidding? This is a post expressly for people who are interested in this kind of thing, like me! My translation work is almost exclusively into English, so I've rarely had cause to think about translating into a language with more rather than fewer levels of formality/familiarity etc. As china_shop says above, fascinating to think about, and if you have any specific examples of going from Chinese to German in Guardian etc. I'd love to hear about it.
On the other hand, the team documents for the German viki teams are full of lists like "this person addresses these persons as X" "this person addresses other persons as Y". Which is a pain.
I don't know, probably a pain but good for consistency? It sounds like the drama version of the glossaries I use for technical translation...
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Date: 2020-11-16 09:56 am (UTC)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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Date: 2020-11-16 10:12 am (UTC)That makes a lot of sense. I tend to want to use the English because I find the word "Envoy" evocative, but who knows whether that's the right reaction? I've used "Brother Black" for "Hei Lao-ge" once or twice, but as you say I think that depends on the reader having a sense of the source word, otherwise it just sounds monk-like... . (The only characters in Guardian I would allow to use "bro" are the college boys who attack Zhang Ruonan, it is not a word I care for much.)
lol, that Hangul, I see what you mean. I almost like the unwieldiness of the English "Black-Cloaked Envoy," though, just because you have to slow down and pronounce it formally; it's a little bit removed from everyday language. Also, we tend to say "the Regent" instead of 摂政官？forgotten his Chinese? and "the Lord Guardian" instead of 領主 (likewise), so I like the titles as exceptions. All that said, I've never been bothered by finding Hei Pao Shi in a fic...
Similarly, it's useful to use -ge so you can distinguish it from -xiong. I love all the nuance and inferred meaning behind the different address forms (even if I only understand a fraction of them), and translation tends to flatten.
Yes! I was thinking while writing other comments as well that this whole conversation is by definition biased, because we're all language fanciers who are likely to find source-language words interesting and engaging when used in subtitles or fic, as a source of linguistic/cultural pleasure as well as the rest; presumably not everyone reacts that way, but you couldn't prove it by me. :)
Also, separate point, I'm most likely to use "my Black-Cloaked Friend" or "his younger brother" (rather than Didi) in fanfic when I'm trying to obscure my identity for the purposes of anon periods in exchanges. Heh.
ha! You have now given yourself away, of course, and will have to find new synonyms :) I know what you mean, though. It can be kind of fun searching for those particular linguistic habits...
Edited (so much blather
I will happily chatter back and forth about this kind of thing for ever, so please feel free to go on at length any time!
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Date: 2020-11-16 10:22 am (UTC)Now that you mention it, this is true. I was a little bit used to that from short forays into manga-based fic writing, but in Japanese I'm confident enough to pick and choose my own translation conventions, not so in Chinese, God knows.
Also, the many times the subtitles just entirely gloss over what the characters call each other, like ever time someone says "Xiaoge" and it's subtitled as "Kylin"
I chattered at marycrawford above a LOT about nicknames in the Lost Tomb thing, but basically everyone has one, don't they? Sometimes three (six! nine!). Definitely a subtitler's headache, although that said they could have done so much better, especially because the wealth of nicknames is part of the fun and a lot of the characterization of the relationships. (Bai Haotian = Xiao Bai, Bai-jingli, si-mei and so on depending on who's talking to her, just for one, plus once when Wu Xie gets annoyed and says "Haotian-tongzhi!").
and when you get to things like "shijie" it becomes totally hopeless.
As you say--it looks like most fics just say "shijie" and people know what it means, and I can't imagine a translation that would be both effective and natural; I feel like that applies to a lot of the xianxia stuff.
my first instinct would be to go for something more archaic in this case (Ihr rather than Sie, maybe a mocking "Euer Gnaden"), but then you introduce another element that's not present in the original.
still, it would be closer than you can get in English, I think--translating the spirit of the thing. That one is particularly tough because he has to be saying something specific there for Shen Wei to react to in his next line. I might do something like "After you, honored Professor," which is not great either... Interesting to hear how German and other languages might cope.
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Date: 2020-11-16 10:30 am (UTC)I don't know, probably a pain but good for consistency?
Sure, that's why they have them. They're absolutely necessary. But they take up a good part of the document. Otoh, the other languages I know all distinguish between formal and informal address, only English doesn't, which makes it doubly frustrating that all the viki translation goes through English.
if you have any specific examples of going from Chinese to German in Guardian etc. I'd love to hear about it.
I don't think so. I never translate directly from Chinese to German. What annoys me on viki is that the brother/sister thing is kept a lot of the time, which sounds terrible in German. I guess it sounds terrible in English as well, but I think I've just gotten used to it?
The only thing that comes to mind now at all is "jia you!" which is always translated into "fighting!" in English, which is already bad enough and i hate it so much. The German teams often just leave it as "jia you", which is sad, because there is a German idiom "Gib Gas!" which *literally* means "add fuel". There are lots and lots of fitting idioms in German that one could use. But so far I haven't had much luck convincing team leaders to get a little more free with that. Again, this has nothing to do with forms of address. :) It's just one of my pet peeves when working on viki.
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Date: 2020-11-16 11:34 am (UTC)That's so weird to me, becasue "Black-Cloaked Envoy" sounds so beautiful to me!
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Date: 2020-11-16 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 03:35 pm (UTC)I'm wrestling with this right now in the fic I'm about to send to beta--I've been using "Black-Cloaked Envoy" (although I think it may have only come up once in fics I've already posted, so depending on what I do in this current one, I may go change it in the posted one), but I have a line that relies on ZYL's casual nickname. So now I have to settle on "Hei Lao-ge" vs. "Brother Black", and I really don't like the "Brother Black" translation but don't have anything better. Gah.
Long comment is long
Date: 2020-11-16 04:25 pm (UTC)(I'm focusing entirely on things like honorifics/titles here; in terms of regular nouns and whatnot, I'm generally in favor of translating them whenever reasonably possible, but even that's very much a spectrum. Like, I would say "hot spring" instead of "onsen", sure, but do we then use "raw fish" instead of "sashimi"? Clearly not. But there's a lot of gray area between those things where we don't necessarily have a tidy corresponding word and also haven't adopted the loanword.)
So first off, I think of translation choices and fic practices (when writing fic for a canon where I don't speak the source language) as distinct things, although obviously they're very closely related and overlap heavily. One is "how can I convey what the writer wanted to say?" and the other is "how can I convey what I want to say as a writer?" To me, the former is far more complex because there's a whole extra layer of responsibility in there (to both the writer and the audience) and because there's going to be so much nuance and potential for playfulness the language use that there just won't be in anything I write myself in English.
Like, as a fic writer I make similar choices to the ones I would in working on a subtitle script, because I personally believe that a lot of honorifics just don't translate well/smoothly, but I'm also not going to be trying to do anything especially subtle with the Chinese or Japanese nuances in my own fic.
(I hope this all makes sense--I have time to write a comment now, but am not quite awake yet!)
In terms of translation, this is all something I wrestle with professionally as a manga rewriter. (Emphasis on NOT A TRANSLATOR; I don't speak Japanese, which on the one hand sucks, but on the other hand means I'm very much approaching my own work with an eye to how it'll read to an English-speaking audience, while doing all I can to retain nuance [I ask the translators a lot of questions].) Since I've worked for multiple publishers and their various house style guides are very different, I have a lot of hands-on experience with both approaches to honorifics--some publishers always retain them (in series that are actually set in Japan) and others only keep them if they're "necessary" (which is a call made by the editorial department).
And coming from that perspective, my personal feeling both on the creative side and the audience side is that I generally have an extremely strong preference for retaining things like honorifics from the source language. Often the basic everyday honorifics/titles can be approximated in English, or dropped entirely (as in stories set in high schools, where it reads much more naturally in English to drop the students' use of "-san" or "-kun" etc. entirely rather than try to turn it into them addressing each other as "Miss [x]"...but as soon as you get into any kind of playfulness or characters changing how they address each other, which happens ALL THE TIME in manga, at least, your nuance is out the window, because English rarely happens to conveniently have anything natural-sounding that corresponds to the specific change.
Without going into specific examples, I can say that, when house style dictates not generally retaining honorifics, I've dealt with situations where:
a) characters switch how they address each other late in the story in ways that can't just be reflected by tweaking the form of address in the English version, resulting in a fairly significant change from the literal meaning of their original dialogue (in just a couple of scenes, fortunately) in order to convey the emotional shift and what the change actually reflects about their relationships
and/or b) characters use cutesy or clever variations on everyday honorifics to indicate playfulness or subtle roleplay or any manner of things and we wind up retaining those specific honorifics and footnoting them even though the overall dialogue doesn't have the everyday ones at all, because there HAS to be something there in the English.
(IMO, manga is a pretty extreme example for this sort of discussion, but for reasons that are relevant to any episodic source material. If someone's translating a standalone novel, they can read the entire thing first and see where potential pitfalls or tricky bits are and do the work with that in mind all along; if you know that characters are going to make significant changes to how they address each other, you can make all your decisions in advance. But that's frequently impossible in episodic stories, and retaining at least a reasonable set of honorifics/titles/etc. makes it much less likely that you'll have to do damage control partway through when it's too late to go back and change what you did in the first half.)
(And then there're other similar challenges, like when a character refers to themselves in third person in Japanese, which happens a lot in manga. Is it going to "mean something" later? Is there a rhyme or reason to when they suddenly drop in and out of it and use first person? Is there, heaven forbid, a multi-page conversation in your final volume where a character is asked and then explains WHY they use third person, and God help you if you switched that character to speaking in first person all along? Because there's almost always going to be SOMETHING. But is there any way for a character to refer to themselves in third person that sounds at all natural in English? Nope.
For myself, I will absolutely keep the stilted feel of that third-person speech in English in order to hang onto the significance of it fluctuating and to avoid needing to massively tweak major emotional scenes to work around our own translation choices. But it's frustrating, because there's that constant reminder to the reader that they're ~reading a translation~, when my job is literally to make things read so naturally in English that you can almost forget it's not the original version.)