Well, now we're talking about popular reception, rather than authorial intent; as Nuke laid out, the authorial intent is fairly clear as by the scene script, and I will trust the professional translator over any machine tool.

Japanese fans often have a more informed perspective than Western fans through a lesser language barrier and closer proximity to the circumstances under which Eva was created, but that does not make their interpretation infallible or authoritative; I would therefore put little importance to a dic.pixiv entry compared to actual production material, as it is pretty much just fanart wikipedia, with all the implications and pitfalls that that carries.

Blockio wrote:Well, now we're talking about popular reception, rather than authorial intent; as Nuke laid out, the authorial intent is fairly clear as by the scene script, and I will trust the professional translator over any machine tool.

According to Nuke, the autorial intent is confusing, because it mentions many M/F couples, which doesn't appear on the scene.

Blockio wrote:Japanese fans often have a more informed perspective than Western fans through a lesser language barrier and closer proximity to the circumstances under which Eva was created, but that does not make their interpretation infallible or authoritative; I would therefore put little importance to a dic.pixiv entry compared to actual production material, as it is pretty much just fanart wikipedia, with all the implications and pitfalls that that carries.

To be fair, IntrovertedAnon has said a good amount of Japanese people interpret the words in the script like Kaworu and Rei being a couple (not only the person in Pixiv).

It is also not impossible for a professional translator to not understand some expressions.

When we only have the dialogues of 3.0+1.0 (not the official Amazon subs), I remember an example of translators being confused with a phrase:

Kaji: 葛城と一緒に
老後は 畑仕事でもどうです?


One or two translators said Kaji words were translated this way:

Kaji: Why don't you and Katsuragi spend your golden years working the fields together?


However, apparently, Japanese people said Kaji was implicitly including himself inside the phrase. Amazon Prime subs seem to agree:

Kaji: Perphaps you can take up working the earth with me and Katsuragi once you retire?

Konja7 wrote:It is also not impossible for a professional translator to not understand some expressions.

I'm just going to say this much: That is a remarkably bad foundation to build any sort of argument on, unless you have solid proof that what you're working off of is better.

Blockio wrote:I'm just going to say this much: That is a remarkably bad foundation to build any sort of argument on, unless you have solid proof that what you're working off of is better.

That wasn't the foundation of my argument. I was just mentioning a possible situation.

In any case, the foundation of my "doubt" (it isn't an argument) is IntrovertedAnon saying a few Japanese people said something different.

I don't know anything about Japanese, so I could just read what other people say.

I understand "couple" can mean "pair of something" and can be neutral in English, but that doesn't mean that is necessarily the case in Japanese. People, including native Japanese speakers, can interpret it in different ways and lacking authorial comment you can probably be given leeway for multiple interpretations. Of course that'll apply to non-native translators too and I need only refer you to the ADV and Netflix (not to mention fansubs) controversies going back decades. Remember that we had that concerning Mari/Shinji too.

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I have gone over the Pixiv wiki before and it was actually illuminating... when it did provide links to sources, which I myself looked over, sometimes asked around here, and sometimes it even led to very interesting discoveries. Sometimes it also had unsourced speculation that did not lead anywhere, because those pages were just user-submitted content without much moderation. I had a similar experience in Japanese Wikipedia and Japanese Fandom Wiki (or the older Japanese fansites which were the basis of the English and Western fandoms' own first theories and translations), sometimes great, sometimes not so much, and it was hard to parse which was which. Otherwise you run into the usual problem with fan sources, people are often not very objective, mix canon with fanon, extrapolate from official statements, etc. Certainly we have seen a lot of this ourselves in Western fandom and outside of Eva.

If anyone can find an official primary source commenting on this it'd certainly be very interesting to look it over. Looking at the pixiv article, it mentions Iseki's tweets, Ogata's comments in the radio talk show about the Eva Extra book and illustrations, but I will bring attention that the pixiv article says "they did not deny it", but that isn't the same as confirming it.

Japanese fans are usually way more into shipping and romance than we are (at least from what I can tell). So if this is an ambiguous word, maybe they just jumped into this particular conclusion without much thought put into it. I saw this happening a lot back in March of 2021 (when the movie was released, but only over there at first). This confused the heck out of us, who were getting second hand information at the time...
I'll go with Nuke.

Nuke definitely translated to the most accurate translation, but I mean we shouldn't ignore the confusing fact that the final product clearly derails from the contents of the script. The script mentions "multiple couples of men and women" but in the final scene, Rei and Kaworu are the only two people standing together. Not to mention the script does not mention Asuka at all being in the scene. It isn't clear at all what the point these artistic changes are and it would help if there were other draft versions of the script to see the progression of ideas.

dzzthink wrote:Nuke definitely translated to the most accurate translation, but I mean we shouldn't ignore the confusing fact that the final product clearly derails from the contents of the script. The script mentions "multiple couples of men and women" but in the final scene, Rei and Kaworu are the only two people standing together. Not to mention the script does not mention Asuka at all being in the scene. It isn't clear at all what the point these artistic changes are and it would help if there were other draft versions of the script to see the progression of ideas.

Asuka being ignored in the script isn't so weird when you consider the train scene really ignores her.

In the train scene, we have a close-up of Kaworu and Rei, but the redhead woman (who we assume is Asuka) is just there with the other background characters.

I wouldn't be surprised if her inclusion in the ending was somewhat improvised. This might be in the Project Shin book or the Newtype issue that we didn't fully translate.

Remember, Tsurumaki was responsible for all things Asuka in the movie. So he could very well have put her there without much weight or thought behind it.
I personally don't think it was something that Anno decided on himself...

My two cents:
らdoes not one-to-one correspond to plurals like in English or other indoeuropean languages.
In particular, カップルら(already an awkward choice of words in Japanese, perhaps for the sale of brevity) can totally mean "a couple and others (with them)". This use is very often seen with proper names, e.g. ゲンドウら (Gendo and his team/party).

I'm not a professional translator, but I started to study Japanese when NGE came out and have been living in Japan, among Japanese, since EoE was released...

That is, it does not need to mean "Multiple couples".

DantesInferno wrote:My two cents:
らdoes not one-to-one correspond to plurals like in English or other indoeuropean languages.
In particular, カップルら(already an awkward choice of words in Japanese, perhaps for the sale of brevity) can totally mean "a couple and others (with them)". This use is very often seen with proper names, e.g. ゲンドウら (Gendo and his team/party).

I'm not a professional translator, but I started to study Japanese when NGE came out and have been living in Japan, among Japanese, since EoE was released...

That is, it does not need to mean "Multiple couples".

Thanks for this clarification.

The dialogue in the scirpt seems to be weird, but "A couple and others" would definitely fit the Train Scene a lot better than "Multiple couples".

That would also explain why Japanese people were saying the script mentioned Kaworu and Rei as a couple (it wasn't just shipping googles).