@WhimsiCat How much to localize a translation is a never-ending debate where there are positions all along a spectrum that you can take, and no matter what you do, somebody isn’t going to be happy with your decision. I personally like translations to give meaningful context/information without requiring the reader to have pre-existing knowledge of a language other than that of the translation target. Leaving move names untranslated might sound better, but to many readers they would just be cool sounding but meaningless syllables.
That said, I’m not an extremist in this regard: I don’t mind reading things with honourifics where they make sense, and I don’t believe that objects/terms should be replaced by cultural equivalents unless they’re truly unrecognizable to even one with some degree of familiarity with Japanese culture. Translation notes can be used in those cases, but I’m also a strong believer that translation notes should never be used as an excuse to leave something untranslated.
Jokes are tricky. I think in most cases it’s OK to rework a joke so that it has an equivalent effect on the reader. All that said, we have luckily not encountered anything in this series so far that required either joke writing (my quips about the damned horses aside) or translation notes.
Basically, I’m of the opinion that if an English reader is going to lack some context or information in the material that a Japanese reader would extract from it, then that’s a failing in the translation... translating the move names is an example of that. All that said, I’m not the translator on this series, that’s Deer A’s job, and I mostly defer to his judegement unless I feel really strongly that something isn’t working. It just happens that our positions are relatively closely aligned anyhow.