What each one says
- -san: the default polite suffix, for adults and people you are not close to.
- -kun: familiar, mostly for boys and younger men, and from a superior to a junior of either gender.
- -chan: affectionate, for children, close friends and girls; on a grown man it is teasing.
- -sama: high respect, for customers, nobility, gods, or someone the speaker idolises.
- Senpai and kouhai: a senior and a junior at school, in a club or at work.
- Sensei: teachers, doctors, authors and masters of a craft.
No suffix at all (yobisute) is the strongest signal: either the two are very close, or the speaker is being rude on purpose.
When an honorific is the plot
Manga turn on these shifts. A character who has said Tanaka-san for ten chapters and suddenly says Yuki has changed the relationship, and the scene is written around it. Replace every -san with nothing and that moment disappears; replace them all with Mr. and Ms. and a school story reads like an office.
Keep, localise or drop
- Keep them: closest to the source, expected by most manga readers, and the moments above survive.
- Localise them: Mr. Tanaka, Lady Yuki, Master. Reads naturally to a new reader but flattens the differences between -kun, -chan and bare names.
- Drop them: clean English, at the cost of the relationship signals. Works for some adult and action titles where they matter less.
Decide per series, write the choice down, and do not mix: a series that keeps -chan in one chapter and turns it into a nickname in the next confuses everyone.
Name order
Japanese puts the family name first: Tanaka Yuki. Releases differ: some keep that order, others flip it to Yuki Tanaka. Either works if it is the same in every chapter, and keeping the source order sits better with kept honorifics.
How Panelift handles it
Panelift keeps Japanese honorifics (-san, -chan, -kun, -sama, sensei, senpai) exactly as the source uses them, rather than swapping them for English titles or removing them. It keeps Japanese name order when the source or the series memory establishes it, and nicknames stay nicknames. The series memory records how each character addresses the others, so the next chapter uses the same forms.
Questions
What is the difference between -kun and -chan?
Both are familiar. -kun is used mostly for boys and by superiors for juniors of either gender; -chan is affectionate, for children, girls and close friends. A boy called -chan is being teased or is very close to the speaker.
Do official manga translations keep honorifics?
It varies by publisher and title. Some keep them, some localise them into English titles or drop them. Fan translations usually keep them.
What does it mean when a character drops the honorific?
Calling someone by bare name (yobisute) signals either closeness or deliberate rudeness. In manga it often marks a change in the relationship.
