Talk:Honorary Go titles

message: Hi,
I understand why the word "honorary" is being used here, and although it is indeed one way to translate the Japanese word 名誉 into English, I don't know believe it is being correctly used in this context. I believe in is much more appropriate to use the word "Lifetime" instead. 
While it is true that honorary title may be awarded to go professional in recognition of their over the board play, such titles are also commonly awarded to famous people (politicians, entertainers, etc.) for contributions they have made to the promotion of Go. In some cases, such a person may be a relatively strong amateur Go player, but most of the time such titles are just in recognition of who they are and not of any actual results in over the board play. This kind of thing is not exclusive to Go, but also occurs in Shogi as well. In the West, honorary degrees and other honorary academic titles are not typically awarded due to academic achievement, rather in most cases it is simply done because who the person is, how much money they have donated or a combination of both.
On the other, I think that "Lifetime" in this context is a much better way to describe recognition for excellence in over the board play. In Chess, "lifetime titles" are often given to players who have demonstrated their ability to perform at a high for a certain period of time or number of games. For example, the United States Chess Federation awards the title of "Lifetime Master" to those players who have played 300 games at a rating of 2200 or higher. FIDE awards it lifetime titles (FM, IM, GM) to players who achieve certain norms and perform at a certain level. the word "honorary", at least in the West, seems to apply a title granted for ceremonial reasons only while "lifetime" seems to imply a title being that is more likely granted for "actual performance in one's given occupation." Of course this is not always the case, but I think it does apply in this context.
I am a feeling that the creator of this page was not a native English speaker and, therefore, was unable to make this distinction. Speaking from personal experience, I have found that many Japanese have difficulties understanding subtleties such as this. Over the years I have seen many examples of this, where the English being used is grammatically correct, but the context it is being used in is not. Many government, educational, and corporate websites/publications are use English that is not very natural sounding or out of context, but correct according to a Japanese-English dictionary. I think this a perfect example of such a case.
Marchjuly (talk) 08:21, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, but English-language material from Nihon Ki-in uses "Honorary". Elsewhere both "Honorary" and "Lifetime" occur. I added '(or "Lifetime")'.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:980:3FF4:1:B62E:99FF:FE4C:71C3 (talk) 11:01, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

text: I don't know whether people would be happy with Japanese references. There is the Nihon Ki-in player page.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:980:3FF4:1:B62E:99FF:FE4C:71C3 (talk) 11:31, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Honorary" vs. "Lifetime"