Re: translation of a phrase to English

Travers Naran wrote:
John N. wrote:
My basic question is, how would one translate the following
phrase into English?
ふらりと出てきてくれること
<...> A (slightly abbreviated) version of the full sentence
this came from, in case the context helps, is:
俺は心の底から宇宙人が目の前にふらりと出てきてくれることを望んでいたのだ。
<...>
The くれる means "to give to me" (actually, it's a little more
complicated but you'll learn more about giving/receiving in Japanese in
a good textbook).

So what is being given to the speaker? The action 出てきて, which is
another compound. The きて is "coming" but I think I can explain the
idea better with examples:

After studying the responses, I think I've figured out what the key
points that were confusing me are. The most critical one was くれる;
since I couldn't see anyone giving anything to anybody else in the
sentence (parse that!), I was fairly befuddled; adding the 出てきる
was just the icing on the cake. I should have been able to understand
the latter, I've certainly heard such constructs used often enough, and
I did finally find in in my grammar references. After seeing
all the translations here, though, I found my key to unlocking
くれる in my Kodansha Furigana dictionary, which says that
following a -て form, くれる can mean "to do the favor of".
Initially,
this seemed unlikely to me in this context, and both EDICT and my
WordTank (more accurately, the Kyukensha in my WordTank)
render this more as "to do for one", which seems much more active
in English. However, if I read the sentence as the narrator wishing
the alien would do him the favor of appearing before him, it all makes
sense (in a Japanese sort of way, of course).

One other minor point that enhanced my confusion was that the
kanji wasn't used for 来る; is this because it was being used as
"predicate formative", as one of my texts has it?

You need a text book and follow it through because there are lots of
"conventions" used in that sentence.

Yeah, and I'm working on various texts as time permits; my
biggest problem with the texts is that I both know too much and
too little Japanese for my level, so that I desperately need to
acquire more knowledge of grammar, but "This is a pen" bores
me to tears... :-p That's the great thing about my translation
attempt, I'm being exposed to lots of constructs that I've
heard many a time without understanding, but in a static
format where I can go look things up and parse them...

(For the curious, it's 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 by 谷川 流.)
I could tell from the sentence. :-) The anime's a hoot.

Looking forward to seeing it at some point... the buzz it's
getting over here is one reason I chose the book. I'm hoping
the anime gets picked up in the US... I'm considering getting
it when it comes out in Japan, but I suspect the vocabulary level
would still be a little too advanced for me at this point for me to
watch raw.

--John N.

.

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