Hello Wan! Thank you so much for considering my post and then taking the time to share your thoughts with me, I appreciate it! I guess it’s because I have fandom creators at the forefront of my mind when I do translations - I try to share different perspectives so that creators can decide with different types of viewpoints available as to how they want to write/portray a character, so thanks for letting me know that this has helped you!!
I reread my post and I think I stand by it still - kansai-ben translated in an overexaggerated way is personally not my thing, I think it’s important to establish to the reader that certain characters do have an accent there but once it’s known, I guess because the kansai “culture” could be associated with characters being “laid-back,” and/or “sarcastic,” etc; (not that you need to be “kansai” to have any of those qualities, and certainly not that everyone from that region must have such personality traits ie. captain Kita Shinsuke is very much dilligent and straightfoward, with depth of thought - yet he does most certaintly have a kansai accent in every word he speaks) it’s a hand-in-hand kind of association; so if a character from the kansai region has that type of character trait, then I think through my translations I’d like to focus on them showing that trait through what they say and the content of their dialogue more rather than just a face-value accent. On the flipside, I don’t want to really dimish characters like Kita Shinsuke and the depth of his character by shoving a heavily slurred kind of english speech to his translation. Of course, the readers should know that the kansai folk don’t sound like “standard hyoujungo” japanese speakers of other “standard speech” regions, and sometimes in dialogue it is necessary to show that, when there is an interaction there - accents do matter. But I guess every translation turns on its context and the extent to which an accent needs to be portrayed in any given instance lies on a spectrum (like pretty much everything else in this universe), so there’s no hard and fast rule - but a binary “always do it like X” (ie. making them sound like hilbillies) is a no in my books.
(I suppose the above was my thoughts from a linguistic translation perspective. As to why it’s always american “southern” as the default go-to for kansai-ben, well that is another matter to discuss on american cultural exportation and the hegemony of american culture in a rapidly “globalising” world .. hihihihohohoh i’m pepega i don’t have expertise to speak much about this one really in a balanced way, peace)
I’ll keep giving this more thought, I’m doubtful my smooth brain will come up with any actual solutions ... probably just more my mouth moving + complaining = whinging type deal but uhhh!!
Take care on your end too Wan! ♥️ Thanks again for the inbox, seriously appreciate it! Hope you are well aaaa my biggest love to fic writers !!!!!!!!!
