\n"}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 ‘Tenn\u014d’ 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\u2019m guessing it depends on the title/honorific, and that there isn\u2019t 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\u2019s a cultural continuity, and you can safely assume that the second person who\u2019ll write about the subject has already read the first person\u2019s take on it. So they\u2019ll go for the established term to keep things neat, even if it wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201cI\u2019ve read all the books!\u201d), and it happens all the time when the target language is small, and there just aren\u2019t that many translators, so everyone knows each other\u2019s work.
Like, in the late 19th century, the first person who translated Les Mis\u00e9rables into greek arbitrarily decided to turn \u201cGavroche\u201d to \u201cGavrias\u201d (\u0393\u03b1\u03b2\u03c1\u03b9\u03ac\u03c2), and every single translation since has done the same. It became a convention, because someone called dibs, essentially.