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This title is the only concise way I thought of to ask this: To my understanding, there is no negating function of なら in a sentence, but the translated lyrics suggest otherwise. Is it some sentence construction that I'm missing? (Sorry if the title isn't very descriptive)

This is the official translation of the lyrics, however, I find that the first line sounds off to me:

心の声をそのままあなたに届けられたなら

If I couldn't send you the messages from the bottom of my heart,

言葉も口も元気な芝居も意味なかったね

my words, my mouth, my energetic vibe would lose their meanings.

I broke the sentence down like so:

  • The whole sentence is connected positively, where なら should serve as something like an 'if, then' conjunction, instead of 'if not, then'.

  • そのまま contrasts with 言葉,,元気な芝居, where currently the antecedent clause is not true.

  • -られた does not negate the verb.

So my understanding of the phrase is more along the lines of:

If my deepest feelings could just reach you as is,

then there wouldn't be a need for words, speaking, or pretending to be energetic.

where, the negation of "couldn't" is nowhere to be found.

EDIT:

Upon revisiting this, and seeing that the Chinese version also contains the negation. I'm pretty confident that this is not a mistake.

If so, then I'm postulating this breakdown:

心の声をそのままあなたに届けられたなら

(voice within heart)(keep on like that)(you)(were reached)(then)

If my deepest feelings can reach you only as it is (which is not ideal) now,

With this, そのまま is the undesirable outcome, which fulfils the "implicit negation".

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  • I'm tempted to chalk it up to stylistic translation or smth
    – Riolku
    Commented Feb 5, 2022 at 18:37
  • Your analysis seems more convincing to me. Commented Feb 5, 2022 at 20:23
  • I'm not even sure if those two lines are supposed to make up one sentence...
    – aguijonazo
    Commented Feb 6, 2022 at 4:55

1 Answer 1

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Your understanding is just fine. There is no such thing as "implicit negation with なら". (I confirmed the original translation is flagged as "official" here, but I couldn't find anything about how it was translated.)

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