Three conflicting interpretations of "ことになりそう"

Question

To beef up my listening skills, I've been watching some anime targeted at young-adult or older audiences, and got hung up on this line of dialogue:

また一年、こうして通{かよ}い詰{つ}めることになりそう、ね。

While I understand ことになる and そう well enough by themselves, I've never seen this construct. I hazarded to guess that this line of dialogue reads something like "It seems decided that I'll visit often like this for another year," which ends up sounding a little coy--given the context is a refined woman being a bit flirty, it seems appropriate.

Then, I went to verify my interpretation by looking up sentence examples featuring ことになりそう on Denshi Jisho, and found that it's interpreted in essentially the same way as そう by itself, which is a close meaning anyway (seems vs. seems decided), though it does lose some nuance that way.

Out of curiosity, I turned on the subs and watched that portion again to see how they rendered it, and to my surprise, they had rendered the line "It seems another year has come and gone, hasn't it." Which left me wondering if こうして通い詰めることになりそう as a whole is some idiomatic phrase for "seeming to come and go."

Google searches seem to mostly turn up results for そう by itself or ことになる which are unhelpful. Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

First of all, forget that fansub. It's totally wrong (unless you've misheard the woman's line), and 通い詰めることになりそう has nothing to do with any idiomatic expression.

Translating ことになる as 'It is decided that ...' is one of the possibilities. In this case, it's the matter of her prediction rather than the decision of someone else, and phrases like 'cannot help but', 'have to', 'going to', or 'end up' can be used.

君は泣くことになる。
You're going to cry. / You will end up crying.

With そう (≒seem), it would translate as "It seems I can't help but ..." or "Looks like I have to ...", or more simply, "Looks like I'm gonna ...".

通い詰める is a compound verb which means 'to visit very frequently', as defined in jisho.org. Generally you have to memorize it as one verb. Don't try to split it.

All in all, this sentence means "Looks like I'm gonna visit [you?] like this for another year."

Answer 2

Edited: go look at naruto's answer. He's got a lot more experience to answer this (its my first time on this site, down voters pls no harass).

Usually, ことになる roughly means "to become thing," where "thing" is usually modified by some phrase.

According to Denshi Jisho, 通い詰める means "to visit frequently." In this context, 通い詰める is modifying こと (thing, matter) to create the phrase 通い詰めること, meaning "the thing of visiting frequently." So putting this together with なる creates 通い詰めることになる, or "to become the thing of visiting frequently."

Since そう is used to mean "seems," the whole phrase 通い詰めることになりそう means "it seems that it has become the thing of visiting frequently."

However, this doesn't quite seem right yet. Where does the "coming and going" come from? To dissect the nuance we can try to separate out 通い詰める, getting 通い (meaning "coming and going") and 詰める (which as a suffix means "to continue" also according to Denshi Jisho). Now everything makes sense. 通い詰めることになりそう means "it seems that it has become the thing of continuing to come and go."

Put this in the context of the entire sentence and you get that 「また一年、こうして通い詰めることになりそう、ね。」 means roughly "It seems another year has come and gone, hasn't it." Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.