How to interpret どこまでも

Question

I'm having some trouble understanding the adverb's meaning in the lyrics for the Japanese version of Melodies of Life from FFIX:

消えゆく運命でも
君が生きている限り
いのちはつづく
永遠に
その力の限りどこまでも

わたしが死のうとも
君が生きている限り
いのちはつづく
永遠に
その力の限りどこまでもつづく

I've roughly translated both clauses: "As long as you are alive even with my fate to disappear, life will continue to the best of its ability forever, wherever it goes. As long as you are alive even if I die, life will carry on to the best of its ability forever, lasting to the ends of the earth." The bold parts entail the どこまでも adverb.

My problem is that I've seen mainly translations of sentences where the adverb has a verb come after it, like どこまでもつづく, rather than at the end of a sentence. Also, those translations use the adverb's definitions as is, one example being:

たとえ火の中水の中あなたにならば、どこまでもついていきます。 - I'll follow you, come hell or high water.

Otherwise, it's an interpretation of the adverb.

Answer 1

A phrase like this has an adverbial function, but it's not "an adverb" in any meaningful sense. It's just an ordinary も-marked topic for the verb. Also, phrases don't have "definitions", certainly not ones written in another language. Translation doesn't work by just parsing the sentence into pieces that can be looked up in a cross-language dictionary and then looking up each part and sticking them together. It works by understanding and, yes, interpretation.

Interpretation is valid and necessary. If it weren't, we would have been satisfied with the results of machine translation many years ago, and never even thought of applying current AI techniques to the task. The "example" you found doesn't actually allocate any of its words in English to translating どこまでも, and is itself highly interpretative.

どこまでも is easy to analyze. It's a question word どこ "where", the particle まで "up until; as far as", and the ordinary contrastive topic marker も. When a question word is involved, a suitable gloss is "regardless of". Thus, the entire phrase becomes something like "to anywhere".

Your translation gets the sense right, and is suitably poetic for the emotion of the rest of the words. I think you did fine.

In the first verse, sure, その力の限りどこまでも lacks a main verb. This isn't a real problem in Japanese. つづく is strongly implied by the context. Sometimes in casual speech, extra parts like this are added after the main verb anyway, so this clause (along with 永遠に) could be seen as an additional descriptor for the previous いのちはつづく. Or else, つづく is simply left off the end - suggested both for parallelism with the previous sentence, and with the next entire verse.