I always kind of wonder who, like, officially decides how impressive various titles and honorifics should sound when they...
I always kind of wonder who, like, officially decides how impressive various titles and honorifics should sound when they translate them. Like - is there some specific early modern jesuit dude or whoever who specifically decided that ‘Tennō’ was closer to Augustus than Rex?
To be clear this isn’t a rhetorical question if anyone knows please tell me
I Do Not Know.
I’m guessing it depends on the title/honorific, and that there isn’t like a committee tasked with finding equivalents.
What I do know about translation conventions in general is that, in many many contexts, whoever translated if first gets to decide. This happens when there’s a cultural continuity, and you can safely assume that the second person who’ll write about the subject has already read the first person’s take on it. So they’ll go for the established term to keep things neat, even if it wouldn’t be their first choice otherwise.
This, in turn, happens when the book output (on a specific field) is limited, so learned people really do read everything that gets published about it. This, in turn, may happen because the field is niche, but also it happens constantly all over Europe until the early modern period or thereabouts (when book printing exploded and people suddenly stopped being able to keep up with all the new releases; until then, a polymath could actually say “I’ve read all the books!”), and it happens all the time when the target language is small, and there just aren’t that many translators, so everyone knows each other’s work.
Like, in the late 19th century, the first person who translated Les Misérables into greek arbitrarily decided to turn “Gavroche” to “Gavrias” (Γαβριάς), and every single translation since has done the same. It became a convention, because someone called dibs, essentially.