Maria-sama ga Miteru:Format

Maria-sama ga Miteru specific formatting

Maria-sama, Gokigenyou

In both of these cases I decided to keep the Japanese iteration. Part of it was a friend bugging me to stay true to the fan iteration of the series. I presume it was kept this way in the anime. I deliberately changed it in the prologue, however, as that felt like a more aloof, realistic and, yeah, specific description.

In the same way, I decided to keep honorifics. -san, -sama, -sensei, unless they were intended to bring a point across "well aren't you a missy!" I don't know if I'll ever run across such an instance in this series, but I'm covering my bases with that heads-up.

Titles

I kept all of the French titles. Rosa Chinensis, Gigantea, Foetida and the en boutons, as well as Rosa Canina and any other specific titles that crop up. I also kept grand souer, souer and petite souer as they were.

Onee-samas is one I struggled with. In Japanese it is written お姉さま方, which is a plural way of saying onee-sama. Onee-sama, incidentally, I counted as a title, as it was a specific way of calling someone. Yumi always calls Sachiko onee-sama - in fact they have a little, cute spat about this. She never calls anyone else specifically onee-sama. In like kind, I felt the usage of onee-samas, the plural, similar. You only really see this usage when it is someone referring to the Roses, but not calling them "the Roses."

Imouto, however, I switched to little sister. I felt this was synonymous to senpai (upperclassmen), kouhai (underclassmen) and a broader usage of the word onee-sama (elder sisters).

Perspective

Most of the text is in third-person narrative, so I kept it that way. I've made sure as to keep as much of the text in this perspective, but the author had a tendency to switch into a very first-person-esque mode of speaking every now and then, so there's an abrupt switch into first-person for those moments.

Formality

I've done my best to make a distinction between when the characters are speaking formally and when they're not, but I'm not the best of speakers of "formal English." My guidelines are a bit rough, but I decided that, while it's a school for upper-class women, most of the students spoke quite casually to one another... particularly in the case of Yumi. Slang is out of the question, of course, but otherwise I kept her speech rather normal. A few characters, such as Rosa Gigantea, I had fun with, diving into slang and other such "immature" modes of speech, but for characters like Sachiko-sama (as well as certain "modes" for characters), I tried to maintain as formal an English as I could. This is definitely one I could use help on.

Words

There are a few recurring words that I ended up settling on. I'll add them to this list as I go.

優雅 = Elegant. 無垢 = Pure. 華やか = Brilliant. 結構 = Splendid. マリア様の心 = "Maria-sama's Soul." スール = Sœur.