Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-23.122.217.39-20150626042307/@comment-23.122.217.39-20150726021241

I guess I just don't know what you mean by clarity and flow. I suppose I dont' have your musical background so my opinion that option 2 at least flows about as well as your suggestion might not mean much, but as for clarity "A Moonlit Tale of Abandonment" makes perfect sense to me. It's a story with moon themes about two twins being abandoned. "A Tale of Moonlit Abandonment" conveys the same amount of meaning (with the added negativity of being incorrect in the wording) as "A Moonlit Tale of Abandonment".

As for Portrait, mothy's alterations specified the meaning that he wanted, which was not contradicted by the original Japanese, it wasn't just for the sake of flow. Your suggestion obfuscates the meaning somewhat, which is a different situation. That is my whole issue with it. If it was just a matter of being more vague or specific than the text suggests, while keeping it accurate to the meaning, I'd be all for it. To use Gift From the Princess Who Brought Sleep as an example again, I would be wholeheartedly behind changing it to something more like Gift From the Sleep Princess, a title which is a little vague on the meaning, but the meaning is something that cannot be worded in English without being incredibly cumbersome ("Gift From the Princess Who Forces People To Sleep"). From where I'm sitting I don't think that my suggestions (at least not all of them) are unwieldy enough to not be used in favor of something that isn't a matter of specificity so much as changing the intended meaning.

If you have any suggestions that aren't as ultra-literal as you see mine, while still not contradicting the meaning, I would be glad to hear it. At this point I'm accepting that it's too difficult to make the titles directly mirror each other. Not everything I'm doing is specifically just for that angle--I am also taking into account the individual title's meaning. It's just that the added context of both titles gives insight into what they are intended to mean.

I guess to use another example, we changed the name Freesis to Freezis not just to make it sound like a refrigeration unit, but because フリージス by itself denotes a "z" in the name instead of an s. We just needed the added bit of context to make the connection. That is how I am functioning on these titles.