OtWtaS Analysis Thread / Comparison Works

[Pixel]

I left it in the audiobook version, because I liked it. It says a lot about her relationship with Marlene. She has always been the maternal figure in her life, even back when they lived in the slums. She's an adoptive parent, just like Barret. She was probably more of a parent than Barret was.

 

[Shademp]

I guess we have to agree to disagree about the "daughter" part. I agree that Tifa's relationship with Marlene is maternal, but I still dislike how the "daughter" title is thrown around in the original version. At most, I can see the story saying things like "Marlene is the closest thing to a daughter Tifa has" or "Marlene is like a daughter to Tifa". That I'd be ok with.

Families are of course different in this way, but Marlene always calls Tifa by her first name. If, like in the original version, Tifa told customers that Marlene was her daughter, would they not be confused when Marlene always call Tifa by her name and not "mama" or "mom"? In contrast, Marlene never calls Barret by his first name. Barret is her daddy/papa.

Different tastes and all that.

Like the explanation Cloud had to give Evan? =P

True. Fail on my part.

 

[Octo]

Off at a tangent here, but how long had Tifa been with Avalanche prior to meeting Cloud at the station?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Off at a tangent here, but how long had Tifa been with Avalanche prior to meeting Clloud at the station?

I'd be interested to know if there's a canon answer to this question. We've never been told how Avalanche formed, and who was the original nexus around which it formed, or how Tifa and Barret met. From their interaction in the OG, they seem to have known each other for a while. My headcanon was that Barret made 7th Heaven their base because Tifa ran it, rather than Tifa coming to work at 7th Heaven because it was their base.

 

[Pixel]

There's mention of Seventh Heaven being built in Crisis Core, before Tifa is brought to Midgar. She would have joined avalanche pretty soon after recovering, fueled by her hatred for Shinra.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

True enough, though Tifa would have been in Midgar before Barret (five years before FFVII versus three years). I'd guess Barret wandered into her bar at some point, they struck up a conversation about how much Shin-Ra sucks, and went from there.

 

[Octo]

Sounds like an idea for a fanfic, Barret gets drunk and starts ranting about Shinra, Tifa hauls him outside to sober up and it goes from there....

Just a shame I can't write

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Having decided that I do hate myself enough after all to go through and do the comparison of Case of Tifa vs. Episode:Tifa, I've finally finished it:

https://mega.co.nz/#!K4ljQBbS!_yRi3tu3qxpgajlcJWaDVm5pyfd_MJyxkZaKjiDublw

Aaand my conclusion is that there really wasn't much of anything that we didn't already know about. Danna's translation of Episode:Tifa -- based off Xcomp's translation of Case of Tifa -- made the smallest of mistakes here and there, though what I'm thinking of as mistakes may have been deliberate choices to omit a few words for what was deemed a better flow by the translator. Personally, I try to avoid omitting words for the sake of flow -- I'll recast a sentence until I can get it to work.

There are a few things that force you to get liberal with your wording, but not too many. For example, "ore no tokoro" works better in my mind as "where I was" than as "my place" because of the misunderstanding the latter entails for English readers. Another challenge can be "no da," which is basically an emphasis, but if you were going to translate it as anything, it would probably be "the fact of the matter is." I tend to translate it like that for the sake of pushing for its addition or removal being felt as a genuine difference.

Danna also left in a number of lines that were removed from the first version to the second, but I get the impression the latter was done deliberately to make for a "more complete" body of prose.

Honestly, the biggest thing I caught that Danna missed were the lines where Tifa is telling Cloud she wants Denzel to be part of their family. The original version (Case of Tifa) had her talking to both Marlene and Cloud. The revised edition has her talking to just Cloud. Danna kept the mention of Marlene, though.

Also, the line "Cloud nodded silently, but Marlene was full of joy" had a clause that Danna missed added in the revised edition: "Cloud nodded silently, having just returned from making a delivery at the home of a regular customer, but Marlene was filled with joy."

I swear that one clause is the biggest gain to come out of all this. XD





By the way, here also is the comparison of the three versions of Episode: Denzel (Case of Denzel and the two versions of Episode: Denzel?) that I did a few weeks ago:

https://mega.co.nz/#!L9lUGI5B!3w59LvCA47NmUS3vtEq0Ih09AGj6A2znV5RrCIR9vh0

That's actually a slightly different file from the one I uploaded the first time. I went back and adjusted a few things in there.





Be aware, by the way, that reading these Word documents assumes that you've got Shademp's Excel documents of the Japanese text open so that you can follow along with each line. I guess you could read them without that, but I figured that's how they would be read anyway, such that one could reference everything as they went along.

So, that's all the OtWtaS version comparisons I'm going to do. Episode:Barret is the only other novella to have been released more than once, but there's no way in hell I'm going to translate the entirety of the Japanese text in Episode:Barret into English to compare against the English-only original release. Maybe I'd do some comparisons if we had the original version in Japanese, but, as we don't, the few comparison translations I bothered to do for that one are going to be it.

I do think those need to go into the OtWtaS Versions Comparison Guide when Shademp prepares it, though. There's some noteworthy differences at work that we did confirm.