Koumapan is in a warring age of unrest and division, clans fighting clans, as the strength of the Shogunate crumbles. The fighting seems never ending, clans rising and fallings like the tides. Yet two new players might just mix up the usual games.
Princess Celestia and Luna of Equestria mysteriously find themselves transported to Koumapan, a land they had never heard of. Under the watchful eye of the Muchitsujo Clan, they will find new friends and enemies. And with them come very familiar faces. Faces that don't recognize the alicorns at all.
Rationalizing their world, along with the friends and enemies they knew with this alternate reality will prove both alarming and enchanting. Yet who brought them to this world, and why? And will they ever lay eyes on their Equestria again?
I'm having a really hard time with this because it's so obviously anime-speak rather than an actual language.
If the Muchitsujo-ma (hey, if you can stick -nin on the end of a place name to say "people of", then you can stick -ma at the end to say "ponies of" :-)) are speaking Japanese, or something like it, then everything they say is in that language and the alicorns would have no idea what is going on. If there is a translation spell involved, then it should be translating fluently. This is like the translation spell was created by an otaku who learned everything they know about Japanese from the kind of anime where "purists" decided not to translate -san or -sama and just left them there.
Hime means princess. The fact that the characters are saying both Hime and Princess implies that the translation is failing, but the fact that the first character they met didn't say "Ahh, shitsurei shimasu," rather than "Ahh, pardon the intrusion", means there is translation going on. But strictly speaking, either he should be saying "Princess Hakumei of Muchitsugo", or he should be saying "Ceresutia-Hime" and "Runa-Hime."
Kimi... I'm guessing you made this honorific up? Normally "kimi" means "you" and is not an honorific. (It's not even as polite of a "you" as "anata" is.) The correct actual Japanese honorific would have been -san or -sama (since Sennin sounds like you're granting them an honored status just from being alicorns, -sama would probably have been correct.) Also, since Sennin has the word "person" (nin) in it, it's a little weird to me in a ponyfic. Maybe "Senma"? Or just assume that because of the presence of creatures like dragons and kirin all over the place, the language spoken here actually uses the term "person" to mean "sapient being" and doesn't specify that the being is a pony, in which case you can get away with -nin words.
"lying baka"... oh my god no. Baka = idiot. If you were saying "lying idiot" in Japanese, it would be something like "usotsuki no bakatachi" or "usotsuki no baka na yatsura" (because you specified plural, and while most words in Japanese do not get pluralized, words that mean people get pluralized more often than not. Bakatachi means "idiots"; "baka na yatsura" means "idiotic people" (where the term used to mean people has an implication of lowlife or bad people.) There is no circumstance where anyone would ever say "lying baka" except that they are an otaku who knows the term baka because of idiots who left it in a dub rather than translating it.
Basically, you have to decide here -- do these people speak in Bad Anime Translation, and if so, why? If you want them to actually speak in a way that makes sense, you can't do selective translation -- every word that can be translated has to be. So you don't say Hime, you say Princess. You don't say Muchitsugo no, you say of Muchitsugo. And for gods' sake you don't say baka, you say idiot. You can leave honorifics because it is logical that a translation spell might have a hard time with those; they don't really match up to English ones. (San = Mr, and chan = cute nickname, but kun and sama just plain don't translate well. And I still have no idea what kimi is supposed to be, but I presume it is also untranslatable.)
I realize that it wasn't your intent to literally replicate Japanese, but what you're doing would be deeply uncomfortable, hard to read and illogical if you were doing it with Spanish, French, Klingon or Elvish. There's a literary convention by which you can have characters say "Yes", "no", "my god", "friend" and some other random terms that are generally separated from the rest of a sentence by a comma, in their own language, and translate everything else, to indicate that they are really speaking that language. By that logic, you could have "baka" in a sentence if it was something like, "What did you think we would do, baka?" But you cannot say "lying baka". Oh my god that is like in the Top Ten on everyone who actually speaks Japanese's list of Why We Hate Anime Fanfics. Baka is not a strange and exotic word with no translation. It literally means "idiot." There is no reason ever to use it with an English adjective. Seriously if you were not normally such a good writer I would downvote and nope the hell out of the story for that, because it is a huge red flag for terrible writing. I kind of suspect you're sort of doing a similar thing with Kimi, where you've mixed up a "you" term with an honorific, but since this isn't literally Japanese you can get away with that. (One of my "favorite" examples of terrible anime fanfic writing is "you temae", because the writer doesn't realize that "temae" doesn't mean "bastard" or "asshole", it means "you, a bastard" or "you, an asshole". Basically it means you, but it's in a position on the politeness scale that you'd only ever use it with someone you consider far, far beneath you.)
The story itself is promising, but please, please, please fix the language. It is currently written in "nails scraping on a chalkboard-ese" for anyone who actually does know Japanese. I mean, all I had was 4 years in college -- I've never been to Japan and I'm not fluent -- but this is still horrible to me. I can't even imagine how bad it would be to someone who's actually a native speaker.
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(sighs) This WAS going to be suggested next chapter and revealed a bit later, but to answer your criticism? There is a partial/incomplete translation spell in play. It works well enough for them to be able to communicate, but some things either don't translate well for them or just don't for other reasons- Hakumei's spells, for example, wasn't translate so because it was a spell. Honorifics don't translate because the concept is a bit strange to them, and the names don't translate BECAUSE they're names. And a bit of it(the bits that are meant to be amusing) they only need an explanation of to fix the translation spell
I'm going for a fish out of water theme here, Alarajrogers, and improving/tweeking their translation spell over time as they learn more about this culture is part of that. That's why neither side realizes that Hime=Princess=Hime. It was meant to be an amusing misunderstanding for later. I left baka as an amusing add on because I figure one or both of them will like how that word sounds. Once someone explains it means a stupid person, they'll hear it as idoit .
So, YES, eventually they would hear "Muchitsujo no Hakumei-Hime" as "Princess Hakumei of the Muchitsujo(Clan)".
As for the rest..... Again, I don't claim any expertise on Japanese. Most of my information comes from a mixture of internet research and years on fanfiction. Kimi was a word I searched the net for and found that it meant Lord/Lady, and was using it to detonate respect towards an immortal.
As for Sennin/Senma? Yes, you're actually right about that.
PS You have ANY recommendations on what to call a Griffon in Japanese?
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Ah, I see the issue. Kimi does literally mean "lord/lady" but it is not used that way; it's used to mean "you". ("Boku", a term for "I" used mostly by young men who are too polite to use "ore", literally means "servant.") The honorific for lord or lady is, in fact, -sama. In fact a lot of dictionaries will tell you that that's what -sama means. You can't get higher than -sama in Japanese; that honorific would be used for the Emperor, among many other people.
If there's a translation spell going on, then use correct language that hasn't been broken by the insertion of extra Japanese words when characters are thinking... which still means no "lying baka" when a character isn't talking to anyone.
A griffon being a mostly European fantasy creature, I am actually not sure if there is a word other than "gurifon" in katakana. If you know of any anime or manga containing griffons, we can look up what they're called there. Google Translate claims it's "gurifon" but they're not always accurate; there may be an obscure kanji rendering of the word that rarely turns up because most Japanese people don't write about griffons.
I'm sure you know that ryuu is dragon (in Chinese, it's long), which means Discord is a ryuuma, BTW (literal translation of draconequus). In Chinese, he'd be a long-ma, which is an actual fantasy creature that looks a little bit like a more symmetrical variation of Discord, so obviously Lauren Faust knew something about them. Spike might be a koryuu (puppy is ko-inu or child-dog, kitten is ko-neko or child-cat, foal is ko-ma or child-horse, so a child dragon is a ko-ryuu I guess...) Doubt that any of this will necessarily come up but it might be useful to you. I think they might have words for unicorn and pegasus, besides "unicoun" and "pegasusu" in katakana, but I'm not sure what they are.
MLP has actually been translated into Japanese. Maybe we could get hold of some of the Japanese dub and figure the words out from there...
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A. Yes, I knew all about Discord being a Ryuma/Longma. I have plans around that angle in at least a half dozen stories.
B. I'm applying the incomplete translation to EVERYTHING because it applies to the alicorns, aka our main point of view into this world.
C. This is all kind of the reason why I put that big note at the bottom of the first chapter, stating that while I would doubtlessly get a lot of terms wrong, I would at least use them consistently since this is NOT really Japan, but an MLP world based on and inspired by its feudal setting that is written by an American author that can't learn another language to save his life and, yes, loves anime and manga and all the rest.
Seriously though, thanks for the advice, but I knew going in that I wouldn't be getting a lot of things accurate.