#alex-multiverse

JP きっかけを与えよう

EN You require motivation. 

TR I’ll give you motivation. / Let’s give you motivation, shall we?

Notes: To add insult to injury here, the verb for “give” here, ataeru, is formal-sounding and tends to be used when you address someone of a lower social class, as you put yourself in a higher position over the person you’re addressing. The English version’s use of “require” maintains this stiff/stuffy feeling excellently.

And, if I’m correct in my interpretation, in the Japanese version, Xehanort’s really rubbing what he’s about to do in Sora’s face and is holding it over him. He’s framing Kairi’s murder in terms of doing Sora a favor and is telling Sora he’s inferior to him while he does it. As if we didn’t all have reason enough to dislike him…

However, this verb can also be used for more abstract concepts, and as motivation is, well, an abstract comment, that could be why this verb is getting used. We might be dealing with a collocation here, or a set of words that tend to occur together. “Raise your voice,” for example, is used in English often, whereas something like “higher your voice” sounds odd, even though when you look at the words “raise” and “higher,” they do, theoretically, mean similar things, especially because “lower” is perfectly fine in this context as the opposite of “raise your voice” - “lower your voice.” 

With this very analysis, my translation sounds awkward because we don’t really say you “give someone motivation” in English, we say things like “you require motivation” or “you need motivating.” And a good translation will use natural-sounding collocations in the target language (in this case, English), instead of trying to translate things literally. This is why you sometimes see what looks like a mismatch between the original version and the translated version at first glance, but then you dig deeper and realize that the translators were just trying to make the dialogue sound as smooth and natural as possible in the target language.

So all of that is to say, this could also be an example of a collocation instead of Xehanort trying to make a statement about Sora’s (lack of) social status - or it could be both. I’m not entirely sure. When I looked up the phrase together, kikkake o ataeru, it does seem to be a collocation, and basically the definition I found means “to give someone a reason/factor/motivation for doing something,” “to provide some motivation for someone to…” or “to inspire somebody to do something.”

The third definition brings me to another point about something I’ve learned over the courses of my language studies: words, especially the more abstract they are, don’t always map onto each other nicely from one language to the next. Don’t be fooled by how “inspiration” tends to be a word with positive connotations and associations in English, because from the Japanese example sentences I’m seeing, kikkake o ataeru can be used for good things… but it can also be used for bad things. In other words, it has a wider scope than the English “inspiration” does, hence why the English version of this scene went with “motivation” here, like the other two definitions I found suggest. The English version of Xehanort’s dialogue captures this meaning pretty well.

One last grammar note: the ataeru is conjugated in the casual volitional form, ataeyō, to indicate this is something Xehanort intends to do… and because Xehanort speaks casually to Sora and… pretty much everyone else, as far as I can remember.

Hope that answered your question, and thanks again for the ask!