Now that you mention it, 90% of the stuff I read are comedies and (perverted) romance than anything else.

What I got from your post is a sense that you see translators use of honorifics as a barrier. I strongly disagree. The honorifics many scanlators use tend to be common, unobtrusive or beneficial to the dialogue. I doubt a new reader who sees Keima-kun is going to be seriously mystified or distracted by it and throwing in oneesan or sempai doesn't require more than a single sentence fragment to translate. Meanwhile, manga veterans generally appreciate the inclusion as it helps emphasize the relationship and the setting. It's like having nipples in an ecchi manga. You don't need them to advance the story but it is nice to see them anyway.

On the other hand, the view of the past in that video is far too rose colored. Back in the bad bad VHS days and flipped over left to right manga adaptations, professional releases were in a word, shit. Releases were at best unreliable and series were frequently dropped. Crap ovas filled the (small) shelf because long series required too much money and commitment to produce. Subtitled cassettes with translations that would make todays speed subbers delay their releases were sold for up to ten dollars more than dubbed animation, if it was even available. The less one says about the dubbing, the better.

I had tapes that had only two episodes on them that cost me $30 each in the early nineties. When they tried to pull this crap with DVDs, I stopped buying licensed anime altogether. Meanwhile, I don't know about scanlations but ancient fansubs were not much different than current ones. They had the same intrusive notes and the same honorifics as the current ones, only with blurry hard to read walls of hard subbed text, misspellings and bad timing. The 90's weren't called the dark age of anime in the U.S. for nothing.

Thankfully, cultural differences are the only real hurdles remaining today and it should stay that way. You won't see a pair of high school girls fighting butt naked in a public bath in an American comic or cartoon but it was a children's show called Ranma 1/2 in Japan. I can count the number of bloody violent american cartoons I've seen with one hand and still have fingers left over but such stories are a dime in a dozen in anime.

Should nudity and bloody violence be censored out to reach a wider audience? Hell no! Should Japanese be translated with the original honorifics or without? 9/10 readers seem to say keep 'em.

I prefer it when my manga is in Japanglish. 😉

90% of the readers are content with shitty speedsubs and shitty speedscans. Does that mean 90% of the readers refuse to read high quality scanlations?

It's a translation. So no honorifics, no typically Japanese endearments and fix the horrendous Engrish. As a Japanese studies scholar, I get nauseous every time I see honorifics and perfectly translatable terms left in translation. It's annoying, it's useless, and it distracts from the text.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Who said people refuse high quality? I love high quality. I hate the nineties' translations and the over emphasis on localization by licensed publishers.

Flipping manga from "right to left" to "left to right," censoring out panels pages and even chapters, translating/editing out every bit of Japanese including sound effects, unreliable snail's pace releases, bad translations (I never knew onigiri meant donut in Japanese) and changing names like "Satoshi" and "Kasumi" to "Ash" and "Misty" is not my idea of high quality. Compared to this toxic waste, I'll take your so called shitty speedsubs and speedscans any day of the week.

From what I've seen, heard and or read, the only people who argue that Japanese honorifics and other simple rōmaji should be left in a translation are those who don't understand any Japanese (Roman) other than that. Now that they know what that roman means, it's put on a pedestal; I guess it's prestige, which is quite silly in its own right, considering how simple that roman is.

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the honorifics in manga because it helps the characters stay in character. For example since they're Japanese I would expect them to call each other with honorifics. For me it's only natural. It's kind of like when you call someone's name, you say it according to how they pronounce it in the country the person comes from. But they do sound terrible when spoken in English dubbed anime. But hey, I only depend on Animax when it comes to anime, and as far as I can remember, they always pronounce Japanese name as though it's English (so chan becomes chen and so on)

I wouldn't agree to going back to the way publishers did things back in the eighties/nineties. There's nothing wrong with keeping the original Japanese names at all, no need to "Americanize" things.
Publishers have gone away from the stupid "right to left" to "left to right" flip and the majority of name changes, which is good.
There's a reason why it's snail pace releases a majority of the time, but I won't get into that, it has nothing to do with the translations, which is the topic. Doesn't make people less pissed about it though.
Your distaste for "bad translations" is incorrectly labeled. This is just localizing done to the extreme, wiping out any form of Japanese for the target audience: the general public. I wouldn't agree to this (and hopefully I didn't give this impression in my long speeches).
The less the media was aimed at the general public, the less censorship came into play. It still comes into play in some forms, but you may or may not notice it since it was reduced quite a bit (at least, for American publishers. I've heard cases in other countries where Lala in To-LOVE-Ru would have steam added on in addition to what was already there. Couldn't see a thing haha).

I still believe that honorifics are a crutch for full-on translations. It's only there because the translator is too lazy to get rid of them and because 90% of the audience here (I'm sure it's like 99% elsewhere on places like mangafox) wants them there.
Fine, I'm not in the majority and will probably never be heard by the publishers since I won't bring in the money. I'm still going to call them out on it. Me and the 10% still exist. Over-localizing is a bad thing, but transliterating is something we shouldn't accept (quite a popular thing to do in scanlations/fansubs of today, I hope the publishers never follow this route).
We could be in a sweet spot where both sides will be satisfied enough from what's being released now, we'll never know until publishers move one way or another again and give room for comparison.

Honorifics aren't the end of the world. I just don't want people to use this as an excuse to go transliterate everything.

It's pretty simple for me. I like to see the honorifics when it's a Japanese setting and they are ACTUALLY being used by the people who would be saying the specific lines.

Foreign/fictional or just any kind of non-Japanese setting, I don't like them. If the characters are not... actually speaking Japanese / are not Japanese, basically, don't use them?

lmao. A bit over the top, but he certainly gets the point across. It's funny how often the "professional translators suck" argument comes up. And honestly, after watching that youtube vid I'm actually conscious of how often I stop a fansub in order to read a TL note. I'll probably keep an eye out for how groups do a series.

On the poll question itself, I've read enough series either with or without them that I don't really care whether they're there or not - I'd only notice it if it's said aloud. I never really considered it crucial and I honestly can't say that I know of any series where the relationship between any two characters ultimately depended on the what honorifics they use to address each other.

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

• Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain

Honorifics are a crutch, plain and simple. I know it can be hard to think of a proper English equivalent sometimes, but hey, that's a translator's job. I stopped using honorifics almost altogether in my translations a while back and I haven't gotten any complaints.

So the poll should not Do we need honorifics? I need a Porsche and a Yacht, but do they make sense? Rather it should be phrased should Japanese honorifics be included in professional translations? The important thing should be what the translating community agrees on, not what the reading community consisting of 90% naturofans and speedscan readers thinks to want.

I like honorifics, because it's apart of Japanesse culture, your reading Japanesse manga, so you should see the culture in work.

Also honorifics are alot more specific than the English Mr./Mrs. ... etc. So they get the relationship accross quicker.

Sorry, in work.

you said it. honorifics give us a sense of culture and also i don't want to lose words like shinigami, senpai, sensei etc. from manga.