Why do translators use honorifics in English translations? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Of course not everyone does it, but whenever I see it it’s weird since we don’t use those honorifics. In that regard, it’s like a partial translation. Do ppl do the same with other languages? Why not just use “Mr” or “Mrs”, or “teacher”, or “miss”? I’m confused.
To be honest, they're not exactly one-to-one for those forms of address, at least the way I've always understood it. Even if a lot of official translations might do that, it feels odd to just cut them out entirely when it's such an integral part of the language and, in many cases, they don't necessarily line up with parts of speech from other languages, especially when using them is often an important indicator of how familiar a character is with another, or other social nuances.
For instance, would you call a friend 'Ms. Jane' or 'Mr. Joe'? And yet it's common for Japanese to even refer to friends as 'Mahiru-san'/'Mahiru-chan' or 'Amane-kun', and different friends might use different honorifics for the same mutual friend, like one might refer to a guy as 'Amane-chan' for whatever reason, even though '-chan' would normally be expected for a girl by foreigners, I suspect... but you're not going to localize that as 'Ms. Amane' when he's clearly a dude, right? Best to leave it as-is, as 'Amane-chan'.
I could see Japanese honorifics being dropped for a story set in another part of the world or an 'isekai' where the majority of the cast shouldn't be expected to follow Japanese social and cultural norms (or even a sci-fi story with seemingly Western characters, like, say Cowboy Bebop), but I see no reason to do so with a story clearly set in Japan with Japanese characters, when the use of distinct honorifics, or lack thereof, can have significance.
