@htfnoelle
You say: "After all, a Japanese author is not going to include English honorifics for their characters when writing for a Japanese audience. For them, the use of Japanese honorifics would be to prioritize the immersion of their Japanese-speaking audience." That is by no means a given. There has to be a certain amount of aping the depicted culture's social structures--including honorifics--or the depiction of that culture would be unconvincing or unrecognizable. Showing us a European style setting but referring to the various characters as shoguns and samurai instead of dukes, counts, knights, and the like would not fly, regardless of how it might assist the immersion of the Japanese-speaking audience, linguistically. And if a Japanese author was writing about contemporary American schoolkids, they would be utterly breaking immersion if they had them refer to each other as Smith-san, Megan-chan, and Jackson-sensei.
However, in manga, the authors are almost never writing about Actual Feudal Europe--they are almost invariably writing about another universe that is uncannily like Feudal Europe
as depicted in Japanese Video Games. This is an important difference, because not only are there all the MMORPG tropes of skill points, adventurers' guilds, and demon lords, there is also the fact that everyone in these Japanese Video Games speaks Japanese and uses Japanese honorifics...sometimes in addition to the European honorifics, like "Sir Williams-sama". So even though the setting might
appear European, it is still a 100% Japanese setting, and Japanese language and many Japanese customs are part and parcel of it. This is why removing the honorifics diminishes, not enhances, the authenticity.
And as far as the idea goes of changing the styles of address to avoid breaking the immersion of the audience, as I indicated in my previous post, it is best to look at who the audience really is. On Mangadex, or really on whatever sites these translation might find their way to, the audience is not a casual English-speaking audience that might dip their toe into the more popular mangas, like
One Piece, or
Fruits Basket, or
Shokugeki no Soma, etc. Sure, those translations might actually be here (before the licensing hammer comes down, at least), but those already have official translations which have been so over-localized that you could be forgiven for thinking that they were the product of some American media conglomerate, if it wasn't for the fact that everyone had funny names. But most of the readers here are looking for more niche manga, but specific types of niche manga--an example would be this manga which is an isekai otome game manga. I am sure that I did not lose or confuse anyone reading this post when I said "isekai" or "otome", and that is the point.
This audience--you, me, and 99.99% of everyone else who might read an isekai otome game manga--does not need, and probably does not want, all the Japanese cultural signifiers either stripped out or "translated". We have all put in a lot of time and love learning about senpai/kouhi and itadakimasu and aniki and okonomiyaki and tsundere and all the other words and concepts we have had to master to really understand what was going on. And frankly, when it is gone, it is jarring--especially the most basic stuff, like terms for family members, which sounds particularly janky in English, because English speakers do not go around calling our siblings by title on a regular basis.
You, and the translators, may call this a stylistic choice, and it is. But it is one made for the gratification of the translators rather than the service of the intended audience. I urge them to reconsider and choose differently.
