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It’s well known that there are many, quite subtle, forms of honorific address
in the Japanese language from those of the highest rank to the lowest, and
even those of unknown rank. And of course depending on the station of the
addresser as well.
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2021-04-17T00:32:44.977
86183
2021-08-24T23:54:04.743
2021-08-24T23:54:04.743
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question
translation honorifics
How should honorific suffixes be ideally translated to capture their full meaning, given unlimited space?
English really has nothing remotely equivalent to honorifics. We may
occasionally talk about code switching, but that's about the extent of it and
is more like a candle to the bright blazing sun of distinctive layers inherent
in Japanese.

Depending on where you grew up in the Anglo-sphere, you may have an awareness
of the social implications of social class. If you are English, you are
probably strongly consciously aware of this. Most Americans are blithely
oblivious to it. If you grew up in a military family or in a community around
a military base, you may have a very strong sense of rank and the importance
of getting peoples titles right.

And, if you're culturally connected to other European languages, such as
German, you may also have a strong sense to strictures about how you address
others or speak about them. (I'm familiar with German culture; but I'm not
familiar with French or Russian and so don't how strong these social
distinctions are made there.)

This distinction between _inside_ and _outside_ in Japanese culture, though,
is quite distinct and quite different from any of the situations mentioned
above. My experience of social distinctions made in English feel very rigid,
impersonal, and a bit like a straight-jacket. Somehow it doesn't really feel
that way in Japanese at all.

One of the most frequent comments I heard from my Japanese teachers, when they
were commenting on the differences between Japanese and Western culture, was
how they felt there was a kind of deficit to English in how it lacked anything
resembling _keigo_. They were all inclined to express it as an aesthetic
deficit of sorts. At first this seemed a very strange way to put for me, but
the more I've become familiar with Japanese and comfortable in its culture,
reading its literature, etc the more I came to understand something of what
they meant.

That's a rather simplistic description. The use of honorifics (keigo) is
certainly far more complex and socially nuanced than mere aesthetics. But,
when you've been able to participate in the culture (been to weddings, births,
funerals; participated in informal get togethers; been a regular
participant/observer in the conversations with an old teacher and his former
students who decades later still came to visit and chat), you are able to
experience these distinctions that are made. You can feel something undeniably
present in the language that goes beyond anything we who grew up with Western
sensibilities are capable of expressing in our Western languages.

When I have read (or heard) folks try to translate the distinctions of
honorifics into English, it comes across dreadfully. It can be almost
embarrassing. Sometimes it just seems to make a mockery of the language and
feels like an insult to Japanese culture. However much these translations try
to comprehend the nuances of _keigo_ , in English they will always miss the
mark: we just don't have anything remotely like it in English.

A bit of an aside, but I've often wondered, how do the Japanese think about
themselves as individuals as opposed to how we in the West do. (Don't leap too
quickly, there's something deeper I'm trying to get at here.) In Japanese, who
you are is strongly contextually (socially) contingent. If you refer to
yourself, there really isn't a single, neutral choice. And you have quite a
range of choices from われわれ to わたし to あたし to ぼく to おれ to じぶん to うち to こちら and
much more. In English, we've just got "I". No matter what context "I" find
myself in "I" am always "I". Though Japanese can surely think of themselves as
unique individuals, I can't help but feel that even this mere accident of how
one refers to oneself has at some deep level an impact on how one understands
the world and one's place in it.

I gave eight different words that could (depending on social context, gender,
age, social status etc) identify and linguistically single "me" out from the
rest. And (again depending on social context, gender, age, social status etc)
the use (or mis-use) of such words becomes a statement about how I perceive
myself in this world.

At a fundamentally basic level, if you really want to be able to have an all
encompassing way of expressing these distinctions in English, how in the world
could you convey this? At best it will either sound extremely artificial; at
worst it will likely completely steal center stage from what's really being
said in Japanese.

To take an anecdote from my own life, once at work I was talking to a friend
of mine at work and started saying something about her. I used the word あなた,
but no one heard me say that. Instead they heard me say あんた which raised a
couple eyebrows and lead to a good deal of teasing from all. There was no
sense denying that I said what they heard; they heard what they heard. I was a
gai-jin; at the time I'd only been in Japan a very brief time. Additionally we
were all quite young. Still, when I've tried to tell this story to my American
friends, they really can't grasp what the story is about. There are nuances in
the words, but any attempt to translate this into English commits you to a
narrow sliver of all that might have been felt in my faux pas.

My point is two-fold. (1) If you're trying to get a feel for what the
honorifics are all about, there is no better substitute than fully immersing
yourself in the culture. (2) If you're going to try find a one-to-one
correspondence between honorifics in Japanese and English, you will either
create horrendous English, potentially make a mockery of Japanese, or get so
bogged down in the nuances to lose the thread of what was being said.
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2021-04-17T04:45:39.727
86187
2021-04-17T04:51:33.430
2021-04-17T04:51:33.430
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answer