The characters in question are a pair of taxi drivers Miss Su employs, so I don’t know if that changes anything based on their rank in society. One of the other characters has the surname of Xiao as well, but they only ever call her by her first name. She’s a maid.
Yeah, translation is such a tricky thing when there isn’t an English equivalent. Even something like tu vs vous in French is significant, informal you vs formal you , and you can invite someone to ‘tutoyer’ with you (use the informal you), but we don’t have a good approximation in English. You could say ‘don’t be so formal with me’ I guess, but the context would still be missing. There was also a problem with the Italian show I watched because the word for ‘girlfiend’ and ‘fiancée’ are the same, and depending on who translated the episode and how much they were paying attention, characters would switch from one to the other without rhyme nor reason.
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Date: 2023-11-24 03:19 pm (UTC)Yeah, translation is such a tricky thing when there isn’t an English equivalent. Even something like tu vs vous in French is significant, informal you vs formal you , and you can invite someone to ‘tutoyer’ with you (use the informal you), but we don’t have a good approximation in English. You could say ‘don’t be so formal with me’ I guess, but the context would still be missing. There was also a problem with the Italian show I watched because the word for ‘girlfiend’ and ‘fiancée’ are the same, and depending on who translated the episode and how much they were paying attention, characters would switch from one to the other without rhyme nor reason.