Step- versus -in-law, a Japanese language question

[Electromog]

I hope this is the right section to ask this. Even though the question comes from badly translated JAV titles, it's more a language issue than a JAV one.

I've seen quite a few JAV titles where they mix up step-mother and mother-in-law, and a bunch where they mix up step-sister and sister-in-law.
Not just in titles translated by google or something but even on English language sites like R18.

This makes me wonder, does Japanese not have two different words for these? That would explain why they get it wrong so often, even though they're clearly two different things. Or is there another reason for all these mix ups?

 

[Casshern2]

Well this shows



Oddly or maybe not, when I Google "japanese for stepsister" I don't get any of that just a bunch of pornhub results haha

 

[Electromog]

Hmm, then I wonder why they get it wrong so often.

 

[CoolKevin]

I have often wondered about the titles, many do not make sense,

as for the 2nd question, quite possibly this thread should be in chatterbox

 

[Restarter]

I had the same question about this translation. So I took the first phrase of the AV movie SPRD-1015 which begins Mother-in-law... (お義母さん) and went through Google translate since it used a bit different kanji than what Casshern2 found. I included the DVD code with the phrase and got this:



To get a better translation, I thought I would just take out the DVD code, but got this:


Good grief. Maybe it's true there is only one spelling for these (except Casshern2 had others). The only thing I can think of is that the meaning comes from the context, just like Chinese singular and plural nouns have no difference, but are differentiated by context.

 

[CoolKevin]

what is really needed is someone that can give correct translations, when the original is wrong

 

[Electromog]

In case of SPRD-1015 Mother-in-law is the correct translation but R18 has the title as Stepmom.

The actual key characters are 義母. If you enter those in google translate it gives three possible translations: step-mother, foster mother and mother-in-law. Bing translate also gives both step-mother and mother-in-law as translations. It really looks like that particular spelling is the cause of the mistranslations.

 

[Restarter]

The actual key characters are 義母. If you enter those in google translate it gives three possible translations: step-mother, foster mother and mother-in-law. Bing translate also gives both step-mother and mother-in-law as translations. It really looks like that particular spelling is the cause of the mistranslations.

Like you said, the key characters are the ones after taking away the hiragana. The problem is that most people who try to get the English titles from the Japanese have no time to parse the titles, some of which can be very long. Just as a small example(last one, I promise), the short title of a youtube video I found is 小池里奈ちゃんが消火栓におしりを. Google translate gives:


Parsing out Rina's name and the associated chan gives a better translation:


So even a small amount of playing around with the title can help, but it would take a lot of time for this.

 

[Electromog]

When it is just some poster on a forum that is understandable, but I notice the same problem on the English R18 site which is a business site.

 

[rice12345]

They're all the same in Japanese as far as I understand from the direct kanji.
繼母,義母,后母=step mother/foster mother.

岳母= mother in law