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Context: After entering the room and looking at the corpse of her mother's love affair, the girl said these two lines:

あのまま彼がママに会ってたらママを取られてた？
だったら彼は死んだほうがいいってわけ

My literal understanding of the first sentence is "if he and mom met each other, she would be taken away from us/she would leave us", and for the second one is "if that's the case, then it'd be better for him to die". But when I checked the official English translation, I see this

If he hadn't met mom, she would have left us. So isn't it a good thing that he's dying?

あのまま might indicate a situation happened in the past, so if clause type 3 makes sense to me, but shouldn't it be "had met" instead of "hadn't met"? Why does the publisher translate あのまま彼がママに会 as a negative sentence here?

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    Could you check your sentence again? Especially 取られてら.
    – naruto
    Nov 27, 2016 at 2:41
  • This is really difficult to answer without actually reading the book. You are correct that the Japanese is very different from the English translation, but it might have been on purpose as it fit better in English.
    – Jesse Good
    Nov 27, 2016 at 3:12
  • @sun-solar-arrow マジっすか？けっこうフツーの文だと思うけど・・
    – user4032
    Nov 27, 2016 at 9:54
  • @l'électeur いや、ママを取られるってどうかなーって思っただけで。(理解できないわけではなかったけど理解できないってコメントしてしまった)
    – ra1ned
    Nov 27, 2016 at 11:10

2 Answers 2

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あのまま彼がママに会ってたらママを取られてた？

A rather literal translation will be: "If nothing had been done and he had met my mom, I would have been deprived of my mom." The subject of the last half is 私 (="I"), which is omitted.

Apparently the girl did not want him to meet her, so I think the official translation is wrong.

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  • This is exactly how I myself would have answered the question. If this were any sign of the translator's true calibre, I am afraid I would tend to suspect that s/he might have made many more mistakes.
    – user4032
    Nov 27, 2016 at 9:49
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I'm pretty sure it's just an error. At the end of the day even proof read translations can contain errors.

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