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Shakugan no Shana
灼眼のシャナ
2005 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 3 seasons
ActionAdventureAnimationDramaScience FictionFantasyComedy
Murdered by a demonic being, 15-year-old Yuji Sakai has his life force replaced by a flame that dims with each day. When the flame dies, no one will remember he was ever alive. This is how he meets Shana: a warrior with a burning sword, and the will of a god as her guide. The two form a bond as Yuji becomes Shana’s accomplice in her battles to keep the balance between the ordinary world and hers.
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2 comments on Hacker News
> Funny enough on Shakugan no Shana, there is a character that says -desu a lot and that not being translated and also explained to me when it first appeared, provided the ground to figure out a bit of the background.
That's a joke. You shouldn't literally translate jokes because they won't funny; explaining jokes ruins them. The purpose of watching a TV show is to be entertained, not for you to learn grammar quirks only used by anime girls, so they should put new jokes there. You have not learned any useful information about Japan or their language by observing someone says desu a lot.
An amusing case when translating for people like this is you often have to translate honorifics into other honorifics, because they don't actually know all of them but just get upset when they don't see the few they do know. So -dono -me might get left out or shinobi/bushi changed to ninja/samurai.
Of course I don't speak japanese, I'm talking about fansubs, here, the purpose of those is to digest the media without knowing the language.
I definitely do not speak japanese, which is why it's important to me, some language joke literally don't transmit. In "Shakugan no Shana" there is literally a scene where the protagonist drops honorific and Shana talks about it. That section would need to be cut, or the joke would just not come through because I would have no idea what an honorific is. "Senpai" also has no direct translation in my mother language and it's a figure that doesn't really exist, there is an episode of Full Metal Panic that's around a character that's important to Kaname and it wouldn't come through the "why" if without knowing the meaning of the word. But the word just doesn't exist in Italian, so it was translated with a made-up sound "senpaia" in the official dub. Result was that nobody (we were teenagers at the time) had any idea of what it meant or why this was important.
There are various examples spread everywhere for this.
Teaching some words that do not translate is important, to convey some cultural aspects of japan that give context to the anime.
Which incidentally is the reason why I don't watch dubbed animes, because the voice acting is different. This might sound like a joke, but the high pitched screams of some female characters in anime just don't translate to my mother language and indeed when dubbed, the scream was mild at best.