Was watching Alice in Borderland, (S2E5 46:00) and I heard the phrase「お母さんたち」.
My understanding of this is that it translates to ‘Mothers,’ but the Netflix subtitles translate it as ‘mom and dad.’ I couldn’t find the phrase being used as ‘mom and dad’ or ‘parents’ when I Googled it.
So my question is: has Netflix changed the meaning of the phrase altogether, or is this a commonly used phrase to refer to parents?
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たち means ‘the person it is attached to and other(s)’. Like how 私たち doesn’t mean ‘multiple of me’ but rather ‘we’, and 山田さんたち is ‘Yamada-san and company’, お母さんたち, depending on context, could be taken as ‘my mother and other people/person’, hence ‘my parents’.
If it’s a more vague sentence about mothers I could imagine it meaning ‘multiple mothers’, like maybe describing them congregating at a park, but I assume in context this was a character talking about their own parents.
In that context it’s addressing お母さん as the representative of a group in which she’s a constituent. Basically the same as how 私たち doesn’t indicate multiple 私s but rather a group being represented by 私.
I’ve noticed a while ago that Netflix as well as google doesn’t have accurate translations. Since learning the language via Duolingo and other sources
This is not an example of a bad translation. Native Japanese speakers often use this sort of a phrase to refer to groups/sub-groups of people. For example if you have an aunt named Rinko, Rinko-tachi could be used to refer to her part of the extended family – i.e. Rinko, her husband, and her kids.
I’m watching Alice in Borderland too and I noticed the subs don’t always match what’s said.
For example there’s a scene where an offscreen sound is heard and one of the characters says “何か来る“。The English subs instead said “What’s that sound?”
Is that show any good..? Netflix keeps popping it up but I don’t want to watch anything too depressing or violent….