Help me determine the voice tone

Hello everyone :3

Once I was obsessing about ちよ父 and came across this 4-panel manga:

Today, I got interested: does it sound as epic in the original as it is in the translation? Here it is:

I don’t know Japanese well, but it seems to me that the translation of 3rd and 4th panels sounds much more mean than the original version, which is something like “both liking them and hating them is fine, just eat the tomatoes”.
Am I right here or does the Japanese version have the same mean tone? Could you provide me with accurate word-for-word translation?

Don’t take my word for it, but it feels more subtle to me. Still funny, though

I feel like your translation of “both liking them and hating them is fine" is less dismissive than the Japanese version.

とか does function to tie the two mentioned things together, as you did with “both”, but it’s like “this and this and whatever” rather than “this and this”.

So, the Japanese version does have a dismissive tone to it? As much as the English translation or less of it, after all? How would you translate it? :slight_smile:

“I don’t care” is probably slightly more dismissive than the Japanese, but it’s hard to find exactly the right balance between something natural that fits in the bubble and something that gets the nuance exactly the same.

It sounds to me like it says “it doesn’t matter if you like or hate them” - that lack of (explicit) “I” along with the んだ makes the Japanese feel somewhat softer to me than the English translation.

What makes you say that the んだ comes across as soft? To me that’s what give the second half its forcefulness. It’s stressing the point.

Yeah, it still feels menacing, but less… direct, I guess? Less pointed and more casual, somehow. I think it’s because “you WILL eat your tomatoes” is much closer to an order in English than the んだ in Japanese. If there wasn’t the emphasis on WILL I would’ve said it felt roughly the same.

Eh, I saw it as representing the stressed “will”. I feel like not stressing any of the words in English in that sentence would be a bit unnatural, giving it a kind of eerie feeling given that it’s a non-human character.

But I can’t say whether they were going for that or not. I don’t have any prior context with the manga to base anything on.

Well, the scene is followed by him vigorously wondering whether the tomatoes are tasty. He has his own interest in Chiyo eating them, so I’m guessing the sentence should sound forceful ^^

I also found another translation, this one seems more accurate

Thanks for talking this over xD

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