According to replies to comments on pixiv, it's "up to interpretation" so in other words, maybe intentionally vague.

Now that you say that, I have a hard time believing that you're for real. No serious person would simply say "you're just wrong" and launch a bunch of random unrelated insults right out of the blue.

Which leaves me confused why you were so kind to provide the scan of the original afterward earlier if you were intending just throw random insults from the very beginning.

last edited at Dec 26, 2016 4:45AM

"Doing it for years" doesn't necessarily mean that they are working to get every part of a translation 100% accurate, because that's not what you do or even aim to do in a translation. In fact, that's impossible for Japanese. Most translators, when translating from Japanese to English, in fact, do change things in order to make it less accurate so that it makes more sense in English. That's simply part of the translation process, not a mistake done by novice translators, though of course novice translators will be even less accurate. That's why even with professional translations, you never really get the original because it's impossible to capture in English and sound natural.

As for another book that has been translated a lot, think of the centuries Bible translations and all the disputes that have gone on with that book. The famed author John Steinbeck wrote an entire novel that was about disputing one translation of a single passage of that book, in fact, and it was titled "East of Eden."

last edited at Dec 26, 2016 3:18AM

Now that I think about it some more, probably there's a bigger difference than I previously thought between what it says there and my above re-translation. Let's just say that I do think the tone was altered significantly by translation.

Looking at the original, it does seem like a problem of attempting to break up one big phrase into smaller sentences/clauses. There are some cases where Japanese says things in a much longer drawn-out fashion (for example, an entire paragraph being a single sentence) that, when translated into English, gets changed around to make it easier to swallow.

More literally, it would have been something like:

"It'd be great when those two get married to men and become old women for there to be a sudden instant when they can think something like 'those times were the funnest. Though part of the dark past now'"

I suppose it's not that much of a difference, but I think the tone shifts a little.

last edited at Dec 26, 2016 1:44AM

I wish I could find what it said originally in Japanese to see if it meant anything slightly different. Because I get the feeling that instead of saying "both of them will..." as a simple statement, I get the feeling that it originally said something more like "if and when both of them..." i. e. as a hypothetical.