Will they look for her family?

[Lu]

A translation question. In my detective novel, a retired policeman who is now acting as a sort of consultant to the Hong Kong police force has engineered all kinds of machinations to catch a Triad boss for his many crimes. (The plan is succesfull.) This policeman has always been known for caring about the spirit of the law more than the letter: he'll do anything to save a life, including bending the rules when convenient. Part of his machinations in this case was making everyone believe a certain girl was murdered. A body was found, and he managed to switch the fingerprint files so that everyone believed the body belonged to said girl, while actually it was the body of a Mainland woman who had fallen victim to human traffickers who wanted to sell her into prostituion. The policeman's 徒弟 asks him how he did this. He replies:

我本來打算利用其他通道偽造遺體的，但碰巧有現成的案子，借用一下就更簡單。屍體火化後我只要把紀錄複製歸檔就不會引起懷疑──畢竟對方是個無名無姓、以假文件入境的妓女，恐怕要花好幾年才能查出她原來的身分，通知她在中國大陸的家人。

 

My question is about 恐怕要花好幾年才能查出她原來的身分. Does this definitely mean that it would take years, implying that nobody will actually do this work (and thus her family will never know what happened)? Or could it also mean that it will be a lot of work (but eventually the police will find out)? My first reading is the former, my co-translator agrees, but I find this such a heartless, cruel move of a guy who is the hero of the story that I'd prefer to read (and translate) it a bit nicer. The English translator has "It'll probably take us several years to uncover her real identity", but I don't know what his considerations were.

 

Thanks for any insight!

[歐博思]

I'm not an expert on your question at hand, but just dropping by to say I think the story line sounds interesting 

[陳德聰]

I don't feel a very strong distinction between the will/would here with 恐怕, in fact I generally would think what comes after 恐怕要 is quite probable to happen. I actually felt it was implied that he intends to do this, specifically because he wants to 通知她在中國大陸的家人.

[TheBigZaboon]

Maybe it's me, but I don't  see the 'us' in the english translation as being correct. Maybe because joining the conversation in the middle I lack context  on to whom he was talking, or why he admitted to what he did. It seems that by saying records were switched/falsified after the cremation so no attention would be drawn to a person whose family and given names were unknown, it would probably take 'them/somebody' (anybody who might be interested) a long time to figure out the real identity and notify the family. I don't  see any eventuality at all. I don't  see any actual concern for the family, as the trafficked girl died with false papers and no indication of her real name, especially if he switched the fingerprints. (Provided I am not wrong about whether he intentionally retained accurate  records...)

 

Are you falling in love with your protaganist, like the lawyers who fall in love with their serial killer clients?

[lips]

The original Chinese version has no mention of "who" will take several years to find the information, and the "who" is not important from the limited context given.  So the English translation could be "It'll probably take several years to uncover her real identity".  What would be the "true meaning" of this English sentence?  Does it matter?

[陳德聰]

I think it's pretty strongly implied that he will be the one doing it. He just said he copied the other info over into the file. I think that the order of the sentence is useful, in that he is not saying it just to emphasise how long it would take to find her real info. In fact it's not about how long it would take, but what would take a good many years (him investigating to find her family and notify them).

[Lu]

He won't be the one doing it, I think. It'll probably be the job of the relevant police department, or the department overseeing this case. The protagonist at this point in the book is just an advisor solving difficult cases. And I'm not in love with him (why would I be??), it was actually out of compassion for the fictional woman's fictional family that I wanted to translate it like that.

 

Chen Decong, thanks for your comfirmation (was hoping you'd weigh in). I'll translate it as 'Het gaat jaren kosten om uit te zoeken wie ze echt was en haar familie in China op de hoogte te stellen.' (It's going to take years to find out who she really was and notify her family in China.)

 

Ou Bosi, it's a fun book. 1367 by 陳浩基, if you want to read it. The language is not difficult (to read, that is. The police titles are a pest to translate). The book is pretty big, but you could just read the stories one by one, they work as standalone stories as well. I now kind of spoiled one of them, but not too badly I hope.

[dwq]

I don't even get what he plans to do with 把紀錄複製歸檔. Does he intend to return the original fingerprints to the file, and thus presumably someone else in the police will continue the investigation of her true identity? Or just close the file with the fake fingerprints?

[Lu]

To be honest, I don't really get that either (nor did my co-translator, nor did, I suspect, the English translator). I translated what it says, to the best of my abilities, and since it doesn't come up again I hope the readers will just take it as face value.

[TheBigZaboon]

I fall in love with fictional women all the time. Maybe it's because writers supply hints, and my imagination fills in the details, creating an ideal I would probably never meet in my drab real life.

 

My translations have all been of contracts, advertisements, or research papers in science or engineering, so not much to fall in love with there. None of the original languages was Chinese. Not so interesting either, although my first professional translation was something taken from the body of a dead person.

 

But compassion for a fictional woman's fictionally bereaved family is probably not too much of a stretch to affection for a fictional detective-consultant.

 

In any case, I didn't mean to offend.

[Minotaur]

“记录”指的是死亡证明书吧？

I guess "the record" refers to Death Certificate. 

[Messidor]

恐怕 denotes either "probability with apprehension" or "probability with little or far less apprehension". [ Actually whether it's dichotomous or a continuum remains a question, which is of little importance here]

 

恐怕要花好幾年才能查出她原來的身分.     \(even there's someone trying to confirm her identity) it probably will take years\

                                                               or \I'm afraid it'll take years to confirm her identity\

The apprehension reading (the latter) is impossible in (because it's contrary to) the original context. In the original context, the policeman believed the difficulty of confirming the identity of the corpse would help him to fake the death of the said girl.

 

恐怕過幾年就能查出她原來的身分.            \I'm afraid/Possibly her identity will be confirmed in several years\

The apprehension reading is natural here.

[Lu]

Thanks Messidor. I had read it as the policeman being apprehensive about it taking such a long time (years is a long time to spend on one dead woman), not so much about him being afraid that his meddling would be found out, but your reading also makes a lot of sense. I wish I could ask the author.