> I don't understand why the author leaves many words and phrases untranslated

Because they are effectively proper nouns. You cannot translate them, you can at most explain them. For example, grande école has its own page on English Wikipedia and which is called grande école, not translated to big school or something else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole

Perhaps these are specific names? I could call the US 'Congress' as 'Parliament', but 'Congress' is probably the better choice.

>I've seen a similar issue with Anime fansubs where the translator deems certain words to be untranslatable,

Yes, as it should be. This is why official translations suck and fansubs are superior works.

> Perhaps these are specific names?

They are. "grande école" can be translated to "big school", but in French it means a prestigious school. "carte d'identité" is also a specific document, since you can also prove your identity with your passport or your driver's license. For the "mairie" part, I don't know about the specifics of town halls in the USA so I can't compare. It's probably that they work differently so using the same word would imply the same thing.

> This is why official translations suck and fansubs are superior works.

Don't get me started on half-assed attempts at localization, especially when made by people that can't even understand the original language.

> Don't get me started on half-assed attempts at localization, especially when made by people that can't even understand the original language.

The more common problem is the opposite. People who think they speak Japanese because they know what "-chan" means demand "unlocalized" works, by which they mean works translated into "English but we left in a few Japanese words the readers know".

This provides essentially no benefit because the act of translating into English already removed way more meaning than a few honorifics can keep. Sometimes it even means translating Japanese words into other ones, since the readers don't even know every honorific, they just think they do.

Amateur translations also like to leave in English words in the original text, not knowing they have totally different meanings in Japan.

> The more common problem is the opposite. People who think they speak Japanese because they know what "-chan" means demand "unlocalized" works, by which they mean works translated into "English but we left in a few Japanese words the readers know".

Isn't "unlocalized" the base state? Just translate it, and don't replace the references with others? At least that's how I understand it.

> This provides essentially no benefit because the act of translating into English already removed way more meaning than a few honorifics can keep. Sometimes it even means translating Japanese words into other ones, since the readers don't even know every honorific, they just think they do.

Are we talking about the same things? What I refer to as localizations is when people substitute references for other references more familiar to the target audiance. It's not about losing something or not losing it, since by translating you always lose something, but creating an entirely new experience. The split is then on people that prefer a worse but more genuine experience (by that I mean closer to the original) vs the people that want a better but less genuine experience.

> Amateur translations also like to leave in English words in the original text, not knowing they have totally different meanings in Japan.

Localized vs unlocalized is a different debate from amateur vs professional translation I think.

> Isn't "unlocalized" the base state? Just translate it, and don't replace the references with others? At least that's how I understand it.

That's not what they're complaining about, because that 4Kids style of release doesn't happen anymore. Except for Ace Attorney/Nintendo games/FFXIV, which are still quite different in English (and often better).

They've just started calling it "localization" whenever the few things they recognize look slightly different ignoring all the things they can't recognize because they don't speak Japanese.

Another reason professional translations might have changes is just for legal reasons, like copyright avoidance, or just because Japanese authors tend to be into possibly illegal sex stuff.

> Localized vs unlocalized is a different debate from amateur vs professional translation I think.

The original post said "fansubs". Which is weird because nobody does those anymore.

>This provides essentially no benefit because the act of translating into English already removed way more meaning than a few honorifics can keep.

It provides the benefit of teaching the reader about the culture they're reading about. This casual experience you gain by seeing them can help you understand bits and pieces of the language and can make it easier to learn it.

That doesn't work super well because you can't know what's fictional and what isn't unless you already showed up knowing it.

But also, an example of "localization" is that in FFXIV in Japanese the people in the pirate city don't talk like pirates and in English they do. You can't learn anything about Japan from this. (This is part because Japanese doesn't have any pirate stereotypes and part because S-E's Japanese writers aren't actually that good.)

> Yes, as it should be. This is why official translations suck and fansubs are superior works.

It would really surprise me if it were the case. Being a good translator requires years of studying and it’s not just a matter of knowing a foreign language. An anime nerd may occasionally find a slightly better way of translating a Japanese word into English (and quite often it would be better only for other anime nerds and not for the general public), but it be would really surprising if randos were better translators than real translators.

The problem is that often enough official translations are not necessarily made by good, well paid translators. So we're not translating amateur translator to real translators but amateur passionate translators to cut-rate translators.

As an aside, as someone who complimented his studies of Japanese by watching dramas and anime before eventually living in Japan for years and becoming fluent. I can say that the amateur fan translations were very often much better.

Maybe because "grande école" literally means "big school", but it's essentially a proper noun in French, similar to their version of "Ivy League"?

Not sure why for the others you mention, except that they're very specific concepts in France as well, which don't really have very good analogues in the US.

Or maybe they just like the sound of the French word and want to sound more sophisticated.

I agree on “carte d’identité”, which is easily translatable as “ID card”. But outside of France there’s no concept of “grande école”, so you can't translate it. It’s arguable if “mairie” can be translated as “town hall”, because as far as I understand a French “mairie” and a British town hall don’t serve the same purpose.

The entire story is set in France. Perhaps they don't add anything for you but for me they give the story a more French flavour.

And anyway town hall is not an precise translation for mairie. In my home town in the south of England a more correct equivalent would be civic offices. Also in the UK reporting a death is done online these days, definitely not at the town hall.

Actually I don't know for sure how these things are done in France but that they are done differently seems certain.

US reader checking in. If they'd translated it as "town hall" I'd assume they were talking about a dreadful televised political rally.

Well on English a town hall is just a big space used for events and things, whereas a marie is is clearly more like the local government offices

Vital statistics (birth certificates, deaths, etc.), driver's licenses, vehicle registration, business registration, healthcare cards, etc. in my province are not even handled directly by a government office, but by private companies contracted by the government. They are called registry agents. I imagine if an article about Alberta just dropped the translated word agent d'enregistrement, no one in France (or even the rest of Canada) would have any clue what it talks about.

http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/find-a-registry-agent.cf...

But not everything does translate. Here's a simple enough example:

Some people will tell you that "aloha" means "hello" and "goodbye". That's not really true. It used as a salutation and a farewell, but "aloha" means Aloha: a whole concept that is specific to Hawaiian culture that often translates more accurately as "beloved".