Significant Differences Between English and Japanese

[AllGoodInMyHood]

Well, okaa-san can be translated as "mum" and Haha as "mother"

Japanese is honorific and niuance driven, so you would use different words in different situations.

Best example would be... "miru" (to see) and "kakaru" (come into view)

Cloud wo mita. - I've seen Cloud. (you would say that when you met Cloud, your buddy when talking with your buddy or someone of similar social status)
Cloud wo o-me ni kakarimashita. - My eyes humbly met/I was graced with a sight of Cloud. (you would use that for example if you'd be talking with your buddy, someone of similar or higher social status and in this case Cloud would've been someone important like a professor or a doctor of high regard)

 

[Eerie]

? I know that. I was specifically talking about “Mother” and Sephiroth.

 

[Strangelove]

What I know is that Chichiue/Hahaue is the formal/very traditional form.

chichiue/hahaue makes me think of old time nobles or modern day upper class characters

i haven't gone back and looked at the script again, but when sephiroth was saying 'haha' or 'okaasan' was he speaking towards jenova or about her? going off memory in advent children he uses 母 when talking to cloud about what jenova did (「かつて母がそうしたように」i think?), but お母さん in ffvii/crisis core when he's talking towards jenova (i'm hesitant to say 'to jenova' because she's a body in a tube lol). they're different usages for different situations, 'haha' for talking about your own mother to someone else (you don't use honorifics like さん when speaking about your own in-group to other people), 'okaasan' for a) talking about someone else's mother to them, b) talking to your own mother (or c) you are the mother and use that to refer to yourself when speaking to your kids)

(or d) as a playful way to refer to someone who is a parent, i remember rikku saying 「がんばってね　おとうさん」 in ffx-2)

 

[ForceStealer]

Huh, yeah. So I pulled out my Japanese textbook (which I am not confident in being 100% right all the time), but it does indeed look like I had it backwards about 母 and お母さん. It's weird that the shorter one is more formal. I would expect haha to be the one a little kid would be more likely to say.

There was a bit of an issue on twitter recently because apparently a section of English speaking users like to praise things by saying, "This is the shit" or "This kills me," and the Japanese posters thought people were saying their art was terrible.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Ok I know this thread is about Japanese, but it never ceases to crack me up that "request" in French is "démande". I really struggle to use démande and démander in conversation, it just feels so rude.

 

[Yumelinh]

My take on ranking of ways to refer to your mother in Japanese from most casual to most formal

mama > kaachan > kaasan > okaasan > ofukuro > haha > hahaue/okaasama

Oh.. so Haha and Hahahye are two different words, right? Since hahaue is the most traditional one, does that mean that 'haha' came from 'hahaue' ( like it evolved to a more 'diminutive/less formal" form of hahaue nowadays)?

It's something that happened a lot in my own language ( like "você" (you) is a phonetic evolution from 'vossemecê ' (you) that was more used in the past).

Ok I know this thread is about Japanese, but it never ceases to crack me up that "request" in French is "démande". I really struggle to use démande and démander in conversation, it just feels so rude.

'démande' sounds like 'demandar' in Portuguese (aka 'demand'), so I understand the 'feels rude' part

I know zero about french ( I can only understand thought the similarities from my own language to it lol), but since "request" would be translated to something like "requisitar/solicitar" instead of "demandar", would "sollicitation" be less rude ( is démande even considered rude in french?)?

 

[tobakudan]

Oh.. so Haha and Hahahye are two different words, right? Since hahaue is the most traditional one, does that mean that 'haha' came from 'hahaue' ( like it evolved to a more 'diminutive/less formal" form of hahaue nowadays)?

It's something that happened a lot in my own language ( like "você" (you) is a phonetic evolution from 'vossemecê ' (you) that was more used in the past).

Unfortunately I don't know the etymology. "Haha" (母) means mother and can also be read "kaa" in the context of okaasan. The "ue" (上) at the end of hahaue means up, so I would guess hahaue evolved among nobility as a more respectful way to refer to your mother.

 

[Yumelinh]

Unfortunately I don't know the etymology. "Haha" (母) means mother and can also be read "kaa" in the context of okaasan. The "ue" (上) at the end of hahaue means up, so I would guess hahaue evolved among nobility as a more respectful way to refer to your mother.

Thank you! I get your reasoning here. It does make sense for the nobility to find a way to use a more "upward" word among them xD

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

No, démande isn't rude at all in French. It just feels rude to me as a native English speaker, as if I'm saying, "I demand that you send me an answer at your earliest convenience."

 

[Eerie]

*whispers* it’s “demande(r)”, no accent, sorry it hurts my eyes and I think how shitty it must be for you to make the effort of typing it when it’s wrong ?

 

[odekopeko]

I'm having a memory lapse. In CC, which scene was it again where Sephiroth calls Jenova, "okaasan"?

Personally, my take on it is, he was speaking to himself when he said "okaasan". He was speaking as a child addressing his mother, regardless of if there was another person there. He was talking out loud to himself.

When he is said, "haha"/"my mother" he was talking to someone else.

Both have the same meaning, both are respectful terms, but one is the more humble form of the word.

Edit: kaasan can be also used when speaking to his mother, or to someone else about his mother if they are same age or younger.

@Yumelinh 母上 -hahaue is an archaic term. I don't think it's used anymore in modern speech. But I believe some rich people still use these terms.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Ha ha that's so funny! I used to be lazy and never bother to put the accents in anywhere, and now I've gone in the other direction and put them in everywhere. I'd give those e's two accents if the computer would let me!!!

Don't worry I don't pretend my French is good

 

[Strangelove]

I'm having a memory lapse. In CC, which scene was it again where Sephiroth calls Jenova, "okaasan"?

he uses it during the nibelheim scenes

edit; although he uses 母さん rather than お母さん

 

[odekopeko]

Thanks! That makes sense. I thought it was a scene where he was talking to someone else. He's just talking to Jenova as a son would to his own mother. Wow, that scene actually really, really creepy.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I'm putting this here because I don't know where else to put it

If you say something or someone is ギャーギャー (gyaa-gyaa), it usually means that something or someone is making a loud squawking or screaming voice (usually in fright). But if you say the same for a place or a crowd, it means that it’s very noisy with lots of people conversing at the same time. By the way, ギャー (gyaa) as a single note is usually used more often for guys screaming or yelling because it’s considered more unisex, compared to the feminine-sounding キャー(kyaa). Even more context!

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Ja...-adults-so-full-of-baby-talk-and-onomatopoeia

I'm sure a lot of you already knew this, but I didn't, so I'm sharing it here in case there's anyone else who didn't know where gyaa-ha-ha and kyaa-ha-ha come from.

 

[Torrie]

Cosmo Canyon Observatory has just retweeted this. So Cloud arrived just a couple of days before the mission... Makes sense, but the question remains, why it had to be omitted. I mean, we know, the answer is because. Just because.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1318058424454795265

 

[JBedford]

It was probably omitted because it's the kind of really unnatural expository dialogue you get in Japanese media. The fact it's been two days doesn't add much to the understanding of the story, and you still get the idea he only got there recently.

 

[Torrie]

It was probably omitted because it's the kind of really unnatural expository dialogue you get in Japanese media.

Yeah, I guess so. Where some languages are fine when providing tiny little bits of info, some others just don't sound natural. It's just that I remember the debate over the issue how long Tifa had been watching over Cloud before he joined the mission. Well, that's one mystery solved.

 

[Strangelove]

did they have limitations on the length of dialogue for the audio? you can convey 'the day before yesterday' pretty concisely in japanese, it's just one word, but it's a bit more lengthy in english even if you changed up the wording like 'two days ago/a couple of days ago'

i know (think?) they changed some of the animations for the high quality, lip synced dialogue scenes but did they do the same for the lower quality, simplified dialogue where characters are just standing around?

 

[Eerie]

I should look it out in French, we also have a short and natural way of saying "the day before yesterday". I'll look it up later today.

 

[Strangelove]

that reminded me there's a spanish word like that (anteayer), which i couldn't remember so had to look up but i found out there is an english word with the same meaning: ereyesterday

which i have never heard before

 

[Torrie]

did they have limitations on the length of dialogue for the audio? you can convey 'the day before yesterday' pretty concisely in japanese, it's just one word, but it's a bit more lengthy in english

True, this should be the case. If an official Russian translation was available, there would be a perfectly convenient one-unit word for "the day before yesterday", too ("позавчера"). English is losing in terms of compactness this time.

ereyesterday

Reminds me of the word "yesteryear" and alike. I've just imagined Marle sounding as archaic as Cyan from FF6

 

[Odysseus]

I think you can infer Cloud arrived pretty recently just from the fact he's basically meeting Barret and the rest of Avalanche for the first time on the bombing run, they didn't know each other well before that. Still, it would have been nice to get the specifics.

 

[Eerie]

It's interesting for people who like to keep track of the timeline, to be more precise.

Interestingly enough, the French translation is very different:

​

"I am Marle, the landlady. So? You arrived yesterday evening?"

It makes perfect sense, but it also means that in the French version, she's talking about when he arrived at Stargazer, versus when Tifa found him. From what we can infer from the JP line, it's that Tifa found Cloud the day before the mission (versus some time ago in OG), then mission, then next day he meets up with Marle. The French text is less precise (probably has to do with the lip sync that they had to make match with the translation), and only outlined his arrival at the flat. To match the JP line, she could have said "tu es arrivé avant-hier ?".

 

[Torrie]

I decided to look up the German version (my dying German skills have come in handy again, yay), and all in all, it seems to be more in tune with Japanese. She says, "You've been here since the day before yesterday, haven't you?"



Edit: I couldn't help but watch further, and whoa there are so many tiny differences! I'm sure someone must have already collected them in a single thread somewhere on Twitter. I'll see if I can find anything relatable. The localization teams surely did their job admirably.