This is unsurprisingly something that pops up in my anime-watching, because translations are a big deal. Whether a translation leaves some things untranslated or not. And I think it’s important to strike a medium.

Because on the one hand? All translation is imperfect. Languages do not correspond to one another on a word-to-word basis. Every word is wrapped in layers of historical and cultural context. Well, a bunch of the words, anyway.

On the other hand, many words are close enough to be legit translated. (For a comedic take on this, http://img-cache.cdn.gaiaonline.com/42d790dfcf16f5ce55d007f11793955a/http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/xx311/robotic_dinos/8421-justasweaboo.jpg ) So you really have to split the difference, and decide which words can’t or shouldn’t be translated. Because some stuff, it just doesn’t translate well.

The big example in anime is honorifics (-san, -kun, -chan, -domo). English has no unawkward way to convey honorifics, so most subtitle translations just list them straight or ignore them. Dubs, though? They leave them out, and as a consequence you lose a level of meaning because an honorific says something about your relationship to the person. (Whether that level is essential or not? Up for debate.) But at the same time, you also have stuff like tonkatsu or dango or onsen, and while you could theoretically try and translate it, that’s stuff which is hard to equate with things that Americans know of.