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The following is from the anime Bleach. At the end of every episode they have a little 予告 where the break the fourth wall. After a voiceover announces a tragedy to come, an anonyed Ichigo (the main character) replies:

その予告は１週早え!つーかそんな渋い話じゃねえし!ああっやっぱり時間がっ… (end of episode). The last bit is translated as "Oh no! We've run out of time!"

What is the function of やっぱり in the sentence above? The closest usage I can think of is やっぱり associated with regret, e.g. やっぱり傘を持ってくればよかった – I should have brought my umbrella. やっぱり行けばよかった. I should have gone.

Yet in these examples we still have the expected nuance "I knew it! I thought so! Just like I expected", which seems absent in the sentence from Bleach...

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    I'm not sure I understand the difficulty. You could understand it as "and of course [we're out of time]" or "as we could expect [we're out of time]". Doesn't that approach of parsing it make sense to you?
    – A.Ellett
    Nov 14 at 2:56
  • Did he really say やっぱり? Do you have the audio or the episode number?
    – naruto
    Nov 14 at 3:09
  • Maybe it is the same I expected (the time slot is too short)?
    – sundowner
    Nov 14 at 5:24
  • It's hard to answer this question without actually reviewing the entire 予告. For やっぱり to make sense, there has to be some prior "assumption" in the context, but you didn't mention what it is.
    – naruto
    Nov 14 at 18:33
  • その回まで毎回時間が足りなくなっていたから、今回もやっぱり時間が足りなくなったって意味みたいですよ。jikainoyokoku.blog23.fc2.com/blog-entry-1479.html 『見えない敵を殴れ』の回のようです。@naruto
    – chocolate ♦
    Nov 15 at 15:32

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I find that more often than not, やっぱり can be thought of more as "in the end..." or "after all", meaning like "Aaa, we don't have time after all!!" but without the formal connotation that comes from that phrase in English.

With the other examples such as 「やっぱり行けばよかった」The "should have" translation comes from the 「〜けばよかった」, not the やっぱり. You can also think of the sentence as "I should have gone after all." or "...as I thought."

But like I said, "after all" is kind of formal and serious in English, not used as willy nilly. やっぱり is more of a word to add the connotation that it was something considered before, and often is left out by translators because you can get the same connotation from the context alone.

Hope this helped :)

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