Wednesday, April 23, 2014

"Baigaeshi!"

This was from last year's TV show, Hanzawa Naoki, the story of a good man trying to survive a corrupt banking world.  I only got around to watching it this year when it reached the internet with English subtitles.  I liked it quite a lot.

The series protagonist is not to be messed with.  His warning to people, his philosophy in business and in life, is embodied in the line "Yararetara yarikaesu. . .Baigaeshi da!"  (やられたらやり返す 倍返しだ!)  Yararetara is in the passive voice, so some of my friends' and students' attempts at direct translation come out something like "If it is done to you, do it back--double payback!"  A slightly less direct  translation would be "If someone screws you, give double the payback." Or if you want to go higher than double--Hanzawa Naoki goes up to jyuu at some point--then something like "If someone screws you, screw 'em back ten-fold.")

-bai (倍) is the suffix for times, as in nibai (二倍, 2 times), sanbai (三倍, 3 times), etc.    If you just say baigaeshi, it's apparently presumed to mean double the payback.  If you want to go higher, then you have to put a number, e.g. san (三), go (五), jyuu (十), etc. before the baigaeshi.

At the end of this video Naoki H. delivers the line:



This is a trailer.




 And this is a website where you can watch it with English subtitles.  To be honest, I don't think that the translators are native English speakers, but I'm not complaining--they did a good enough job that I could easily keep up with the story.

http://www.drama.net/hanzawa-naoki-episode-1

1 comment:

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おつかれやま!!! (In romaji, "Otsukareyama!!!" In kanji, お疲れ山?)

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