Bansho said:
To clarify, when I said cultural setting, I meant it in the same sense that I prefer not to use Japanese honorifics if the setting is not based in a Japan or similar setting...
Oh, my bad; I misunderstood.
Bansho said:
If the setting is such, however, I am more than willing to sacrifice fluency for the sake of a better understanding of the original structure...
Why? When I said "remaining true to the original Japanese is obviously the optimal situation", I mean remaining true to the meaning of the Japanese. Maintaining source language structure takes third place for me behind source language meaning and target language structure (that is, fluency of the translation), and it's not clear to me why anyone would order those three items differently. We're not trying to teach people Japanese, and even if we were, making it "Zoe" instead of "your" doesn't impart any additional information.
Now, I'm basically recapitulating the argument I made on pages 3 and 4 of forum #32054, and I did get fairly well told off during that discussion, but the difference here is that we're not talking about cultural features getting lost in translation; now, we're talking about structural features. Since then, I've realized that "cultural whitewashing" for the sake of readability is an awful idea, and that a few translation notes never killed anyone's immersion, but bending over backwards for the sake of preserving the word order of the original Japanese produces "translator-ese", and I see little reason to do it. (Not to mention that I'm not utterly convinced of the average Danbooru user's understanding of the Japanese language; the point I made in that discussion about misunderstandings regarding 様 still remains a valid one, in my opinion.)
Bansho said:
Do I really have the right impose my style on someone else?
I did actually get myself into a little tiff regarding this with another (very good) translator on Danbooru, and my general policy now is to leave matters of style be, unless I see a sentence which I am absolutely, positively sure no English speaker would ever say, with a special exemption for matters of culture like honorifics, puns, and (some) idioms. (Of course, that means I would be changing "Zoey" to "your" in that sentence, like I said in my previous post, but I really do believe that that's the optimal decision 99 of 100 times.)