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This has been driving me kinda nuts recently. There’s a song by BIGBANG that’s a Japanese song and it’s called 声を聞かせて。 Every translation I’ve come across has said it means “Let me hear your voice” and I can see that it’s all te form and everything…
But what about that sentence/title makes it mean “Let me hear your voice” instead of “Hear my voice”? What about it dictates who the voice belongs to and who is being to to hear it?
I mean, I imagine if I keep up my studies I’ll eventually understand that but this is driving me nuts and has been for months. I did all sorts of looking into te form but nothing really makes this clear to me and googling “why is it this translation and not that one” doesn’t get me very far at all.
Thank you for your time, guys (^_^)v
V-て on its own is almost always an abbreviation for V-てください = please (verb).
食べて = 食べてください = please eat
返して = 返してください = please give (it) back聞かせて = 聞かせてください = please let me hear you
Honestly, I don’t know if you would have learnt that from continued study – for some reason, people often don’t seem to think of mentioning that.
Why would it be ”hear my voice”? 聞かせる will either be ‘make hear’ (often translated as ‘to inform’) or ‘let hear’. Like Joel said, it is てください, so 声を聞かせて＝let me (please) hear (your) voice. Why ‘your’? Context, really.
Another example from the GazettE – 紅蓮
［…］僅かな吐息を聞かせてほしい［…］= I want you to let me hear your few breaths僅[わず]かな＝few
吐息［といき］＝long breaths, like a sighThank you both. I think I still have a lot to learn but what you guys said makes sense to me (^_^) I’ll try to watch for similar patterns in the future. I’ve been trying to translate lyrics for subtitling to give myself more experience and I’ve been checking what I come up with against multiple translations by others to see if I at least get it in the ballpark.
If you’re doing translations for practice, you may want to think twice before using song lyrics – just like song lyrics in English, Japanese song lyrics tend to be fairly loose with the standard grammar rules, for the purposes of syllable counts and stress placement.
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