Fansub Style Guide: Honorifics, Tone, Swearing and Translator Notes

Translation craft · 5 min read · Updated 21 October 2026

The style decisions to make before episode one: honorifics, localisation vs. literal, tone per character, profanity, cultural references and TL notes.

Two translations of the same episode can both be accurate and still feel completely different. One keeps "-senpai" and explains festivals in notes; the other says "Hey, boss" and swaps a pun for an English joke. Neither is wrong. What's wrong is switching between them halfway through a season. A style guide is a short document that fixes those choices in advance, so every episode - and every translator - sounds the same. This guide covers the decisions that matter most.

Start with your audience

Every style decision depends on who's watching:

• Long-time genre fans usually want honorifics kept, terms left in the original, and as much nuance as possible.
• Newcomers and general audiences prefer translations that read naturally, with fewer foreign terms.
• Language learners like literal translations that map closely to the original.
• Regional audiences - for example Hinglish viewers - want the language they actually speak, not a textbook version.

Write one sentence at the top of your style guide describing your audience. It settles a lot of later arguments.

Decision 1: honorifics

Japanese honorifics (-san, -kun, -chan, -sama, senpai, sensei) and Korean or Chinese equivalents carry relationship information that English lacks. There are three common approaches.

Keep them. "Thanks, Tanaka-senpai." Viewers familiar with the genre get the full relationship nuance. This is the most common choice in anime fansubs.

Adapt them. "Thanks, Tanaka." or "Thanks, boss." More natural for general audiences, but some nuance is lost, and some relationships are hard to express ("senpai" has no tidy English equivalent).

Mixed. Keep the meaningful ones (senpai, sensei) and drop the routine ones (-san). Workable, but only if the rule is written down precisely.

Whatever you pick, add it to your glossary so it's applied every time - see building a subtitle glossary.

Decision 2: localisation vs. literal translation

This is the biggest philosophical choice:

• Literal translation stays close to the original wording and keeps cultural references as they are.
• Localised translation rewrites lines so they land the same way for the new audience - including changing jokes, idioms and references.

Most good translations sit in between: they keep what's essential to the story and setting, and adapt what would otherwise confuse or fall flat. A useful test: would a viewer who speaks both languages feel the translation had the same effect as the original?

Write down where you stand, with an example or two. "We keep food names and festivals; we adapt idioms and puns" is the kind of rule translators can actually follow.

Decision 3: tone per character

Characters have voices. The polite student, the foul-mouthed rival, the ancient sect elder and the hyperactive mascot should not all sound like the same neutral narrator. Keep a short voice note for each major character:

These notes are equally useful to human translators and to AI: in SubFly, you can put them in a custom style prompt so they travel with every batch, and set each character's gender so pronouns and verb forms stay right in languages that need it.

Decision 4: profanity

Original dialogue often has a level of rudeness that's culturally specific. Decide:

• whether you match the original's intensity, soften it, or strengthen it;
• whether some words are off-limits for your audience or platform;
• how to handle slurs and insults that don't translate (usually: translate the intent, not the literal word).

Inconsistent swearing is jarring - a character who swears constantly in one episode and politely in the next feels like two different people.

Decision 5: cultural references and translator notes

When a line depends on something viewers may not know - a festival, a historical figure, wordplay on two meanings of a kanji - you have options:

1. Leave it. Trust the audience or accept a small loss.
2. Adapt it. Replace the reference with an equivalent the audience knows.
3. Explain it in the subtitle. Expand the line slightly ("Tanabata, the star festival").
4. Add a translator note (TL note) - a separate line, often at the top of the screen, explaining the reference.

TL notes are a beloved fansub tradition, but they compete with the dialogue for the viewer's attention. Guidelines that work: use them sparingly, keep them short, show them long enough to read, and never put them over dialogue that's still being spoken. For ASS releases, give notes their own style so they're visually distinct.

Decision 6: song lyrics, signs and sound effects

• Songs: translate lyrics (often in italics or a dedicated style), and decide whether to keep romanised lyrics alongside them.
• Signs: translate on-screen text that matters to the plot; decide whether to typeset it over the sign or place it at the top of the screen.
• Sound effects and onomatopoeia: usually left out of subtitles unless they matter to the story.

For the technical side of signs and karaoke in ASS files, see translating ASS subtitles without breaking styles.

Decision 7: mechanics

Small rules, big consistency:

• spelling variety (US or UK English, or a fixed Hinglish spelling list);
• how numbers are written (words or digits);
• how to mark two speakers in one subtitle;
• punctuation for interruptions and trailing off;
• italics for off-screen voices, thoughts and lyrics.

Readability rules - characters per line, reading speed and line breaks - belong here too; our subtitle readability guide has the standard numbers.

Turning the style guide into something you use

A style guide only helps if it's applied:

1. Keep it to one or two pages - people don't read twenty.
2. Include examples for every rule.
3. Put names and terms in the glossary, not in prose.
4. If you translate with AI, turn the guide into the instructions that go with every request. SubFly's prompt library lets you save a style as a reusable preset and start from built-in ones, such as the Hinglish fansub rulebook.
5. Review each episode against the guide, and update the guide when you make a new decision.

A team with a clear style guide can add a translator mid-season, switch between hand and AI translation, and still release a series that reads like one voice. For the end-to-end process, see the complete guide to translating anime subtitles.