of course i have thoughts on genshin's english translation; i'm a taiwanese weeb
originally written 8 june 2022.
i think the title says it all for this one.
but, i guess important context to be had here (if the date isn't enough of an indicator): this was written during inazuma arc times; in fact, it was written right around the time of the irodori festival. i play genshin on cn dub (bc at some point i got so incredibly frustrated w/the amt of jp i picked up by watching anime alone that i resolved to also try to osmose more cn where i could) and noticed some things.
genshin's english translation feels like it caters to white weebs. you can feel it a bit in the way they localize a bunch of chinese cultural terms into latin, or rather questionable english, then leave in almost all japanese cultural terms w/o localizing them, but what makes me want to fucking bite over this is the way they inject japanese cultural terms into dialogue that do not reference them at all, see: fucking barbara-sama. they're not even in fantasy japan, barbara is not fantasy japanese, WHAT'S GOING ON THERE!!!
you can feel the way the fandom swallows this unquestionably via chilumi's " ojou-chan" and " zhongli-sensei." childe is not inazuman, and he meets these people in liyue, fantasy china. and WHY mix zhongli's (chinese) name, with a japanese honorific??
because they're weebs who don't understand what leaving these terms untranslated in anime/manga are meant to accomplish, i.e. respect their source origin's culture.
what pisses me off abt the genshin localization is the way it plays favorites with the cultures it localizes to. if inazuma got fully localized to the same weird degree as, like, liyue and the yakshas' latin names, then at least that would be fair. I could look into the source language and bring that cultural detail back into my writing like that. if liyue became less localized, leaving a few more terms or names in just pinyin, that would be lovely. it would give liyue a more distinct chinese flavor to it, rather than letting weebs kind of paint it subtly japanese as I've seen people do.
like, why does ei get to keep the title "raiden shogun", but zhongli's "yanwang dijun" gets localized to the latin "rex lapis"? I understand why the yakshas' names got kitty-cornered into being localized into latin, to an extent, since xiao's constellation is used in that cutscene, and they wanted to match with the latin constellation names they were using there, but like… why latinize the constellation names at all?
like, they give it this kind of higher magic-fantasy feel to the lore, and I can understand that, and maybe you can interpret it as celestia naming the constellations. I can accept them being in latin in that case. sort of. bc if the original writers wanted the constellations to be in latin, they would've been in latin, like how the greek names in enkanomiya were In Greek even in the cn.
latinizing the constellation names has obscured several things in the original cn, like albedo's 白堊 chalk thing, with his constellation, princeps cretaceus, being 白堊之子座, while his names of "kreidenprinz" and "calx" both being the same 白堊 in cn, and I suspect that whenever he apparently got called "cretaceus" was also merely 白堊 in cn. it has made translating the yaksha names a whole fucking mess, as well as weird as hell, considering they're all liyue characters with latin names in english. I don't doubt that there will be more lost or muddled in future translation, or that there are more subtle things I've missed from my frustrating lack of fluency.