ティファ (Tifa)
「あの頃に想像していたピンチってこんなんじゃなかったな」
JP: "The pinch I imagined back then wasn't like this."
EN: "Can't say this is quite what I had in mind when I asked for your help way back when."
verdict: missing the 'pinch/bind' reference that's there in the original again. obviously it's lacking the context of the surrounding lines, and the line does hint at the promise in another way, but if you can call two instances a 'pattern' then there does seem to be a pattern developing. what you got against this line, english dub.
I'll actually answer this one, and I wonder if this is potentially one of those UK English vs. US English things.
We don't use the term
"in a pinch / in a bind" in actual speech... basically ever. Speaking personally, in every conversation about difficult situations that I've had with people or heard in the course of my entire life, I've
literally never had someone say either of those things. The phrases are understood but they're the kind of things that you'd only hear as character dialogue in a play, and it would never come up in actual conversation. We don't typically turn the situation into an object (pinch/bind), but rather we focus on the verb action (help) in regards to a situation that we address indirectly. It's the kind of thing that if you ever heard it, you'd
maybe expect to hear from your grandparents or something because it sounds old fashioned and also approaches the conversation in a way that doesn't match the rest of how most people actually speak to each other in common day-to-day interactions. Hearing someone who's Tifa/Cloud's age use it casually sounds
super unnatural, and you'd
DEFINITELY never hear it from a couple kids making a promise to each other.
While we wouldn't say,
"Will you help me if I'm ever in a pinch/bind?" I think about the closest equivalent that you'd actually hear spoken is probably something more along the lines of,
"Will you help me if I ever run into trouble?" because that's still covering the context of needing help in a way that could involve rescuing of some kind in the way that Tifa & Cloud's promise is meant, but again the situation isn't made into an object that can be explicitly recalled later because that's not how we contextualize those things. If later on, you're speaking about it in a situation that's occurring, we'd just be more straightforward about it as,
"I need some help." rather than
"I'm in a pinch/bind." which makes the contextual surrounding dialogue difficult because they volunteer different information that matches the way we actually approach discussing those things. About the only colloquialism used in American English that I can think of that actually gets used in the same context is,
"I'm caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place" or
"I'm in a bit of a tough spot" which is really just a precursor to explaining the situation that you need assistance with ...but that's also almost exclusively for something that's a situational dilemma that you'd just need advising with, and not something that you'd need saving from – especially in the context of a heroic rescue.
That's why when it comes to the English dialogue,
"Can't say this is quite what I had in mind when I asked for your help way back when." that is absolutely 100% the way that I'd expect to hear a real human sort of shyly address that promise that they had made as kids to each other. This is one of those things where they want the characters to actually sound like real people, not like they're just spouting pre-written dialogue. This is a line where because we don't use that situational object but we focus on the verb, it makes everything around it sound clunky and manufactured if you're not matching the way that we actually approach discussing that kind of situation. Ultimately that means that the term pinch/bind just... really doesn't fit at all, so you have to adapt the surrounding dialogue accordingly to address the same subject with natural conversation.
This is the kind of thing that actually makes me really
glad to see being changed when it comes to translating character dialogue in a way that sounds natural rather than sticking to a translation that's more technically accurate to the original Japanese text.
X
You're the best, hito, hahaha. And also thanks for that again.
