Localization, Name Changes, and Worplay

Depending on the situation and context each of the 3 could work but for most cases i would suggest going with linguistic and cultural equivalence as opposed to a literal translation.

My golden rules for localization : "if it doesn't make sense in the target language, change it but keep the core to make it make sense in the target language but don't invent or add anything that wasn't there already unless it's absolutely necessary"

@tchitchouan The only way to make great anime is to transform all cigarettes into lollipops, all guns into weird spring hammer abominations, and make everyone have very natural names like John Doe

Just keep em the way the japanese intended them to be. Subtitles and translator's notes are enough.

Right, subtitles. One thing that bugs me is how some of them change titles or honorifics like "onee-chan" to simply their real name.

TL notes educate people about a foreign culture.
Name changing is cultural imperialism as well as the assumption that your audience is illiterate.

Just because people don't know what onigiri is, doesn't mean it should be translated as "doughnut". To anyone wondering why I'm mentioning this ancient mistranslation: because despite its notoriety localizers continue doing it even today.

@Shizuna

TL Notes are considered highly unprofessional if you put them in the middle of a work. The way they are usually professionally handled is to put them in the back of manga volumes or in director's commentaries on anime dubs (very rare thing to see these days) as to not take away from the moment. Also think about cases where a direct translation of a character's name wouldn't work. It would be extremely distracting if you were say playing Ace Attorney and whenever Larry Butz (Masashi Yahari in Japanese) came on screen and someone said the catchphrase that they say whenever he gets into trouble and you had a giant note that slowed down the game further afterwords that said "Masashi is a pun on the phrase 'with certainty' and Yahari is a pun on the phrase 'of course', so the quote here 'when something happens, of course it's Yahari' is wordplay on his own name that is lost in English" instead of what they did chaning his name to a pun in English and changing the catchphrase accordingly to "when something smells, it's usually the Butz". It flows more naturally and isn't distracting. It isn't that stupid culture war "CULTURAL IMPERIALISM" argument when in order for something to make sense in english you got to make changes. I believe that there are cases where you can't just leave things exactly the same since you would not be getting the same experience without modifying things. There's definitely arguments to be made over it but stop saying that it is "THE WEST IMPOSING ON JAPAN" when in reality there's a lot of thought that has to go into these things sometimes. It's not the same as "MAN THESE DONUTS ARE GREAT, JELLY FILLED ARE MY FAVORITE, NOTHING BEATS A JELLY FILLED DONUT", its not even remotely close

I greatly enjoyed the TL Notes on fansubbed anime though its no real loss to me that they're not used in official subs. Is there a reason they're considered unprofessional?

@TheDoodle
I'd say the need to pause every few minutes to read the notes is reason enough to shy away from them. It's made worse by translators who use too many. Urusei Yatsura has helpful notes, but half the notes in Goldfish Warning don't matter at all.

I greatly enjoyed the TL Notes on fansubbed anime though its no real loss to me that they're not used in official subs. Is there a reason they're considered unprofessional?

@TheDoodle

Professional standards for subtitles have a character and line limit to avoid filling the screen with too much text. Generally, no more than 2 lines of text should be up at the same time as otherwise there is too much visual information on the screen at once between the footage and the subtitles for the viewer to deal with. Adding a translator's note on top of the screen would cause this issue by now having possible 2-4 additional lines of text on screen in addition to the translated dialogue itself. This can be visually distracting as not only is more of the image obscured, both lines of text are fighting for the viewer's attention and the viewer would not realistically have time to read both before they disappear. This is less of an isuse in manga where you can put small notes in the gutter space between panels or in the back of the book, but in a film or TV show there is no such luxury as time and screen space are much more of an issue, and with video games the time aspect also comes into effect as it would break up the intended space or increase file sizes. There are some creative workarounds if you need to teach the audience something that I have seen, such as audio commentary tracks on some dubs, or the Persona 4 manual giving a glossary of some relevant Japanese traditions and cultural terms to help the player if they are confused by certain things, but solutions like this are not always an option.