I agree with all your quibbles with the official translation (apart from the already mentioned 意地悪 distinction). Although tbh not 100% sure on case 3.
Praise be for digital reading, where 30-40% vocab lookups aren’t that much of a bother
I’m not quite done yet (about 1/5th missing, maybe?), but since I already have plenty of questions… here goes.
One question right at the beginning
あいつらに何を言われても無視していると、やがて「びびってんじゃねえ」とかなんとか、日本語を喋れることを褒めてあげたくなるようなことを言ってから去っていったので、やっと上靴を履き終わって校舎に足を踏み入れます。
Whew, what a sentence.
What’s the と at the end of the first fragment? Is it this one, and she is describing not just what happens there today, but what happens in general in this often repeating situation? Like “When I ignore them, this happens:”?
If so, is the whole sentence (slightly literally) something like
“When I ignore them despite anything they say, in the end they say something to the effect like ‘You’re afraid, huh’, and leave after saying something that makes me feel like praising the fact that they can speak Japanese, and in the end I finish putting on my hallway slippers and enter the school building.”
?
Is the “something” that the say that makes her feel like praising the fact that they can speak Japanese the 「びびってんじゃねえ」とかなんとか? From the sentence it felt a bit like it’s something separate they say afterwards, which is weird.
Three questions towards the end
「あなた、人間相手ならまだしも、猫の世界でもそんなんじゃ嫌われるわよ」
Is that “With a human that’s fine, but if you did something like that in a place like cat society you’d be hated.”?
I’m glad I found the Bunpro entry for ならまだしも. Just having the “rather”/“better” definitions from JMdict didn’t really help much here. “A is fine…but B is not” makes much more sense.
もしかすると、出かけているおばあちゃんとすれ違うかもしれないとも思ったけれど、そんなこともなく、私達は下の公園まで下りてきました。
Does that mean she thought that she’d meet the old woman while going down the hill? I understood すれ違う more in the sense of failing to meet each other.
尻尾のちぎれた彼女はよほど期待を裏切られたのが悲しかったのか、私の足元でごろごろと転がっていました。
I assume that the 彼女はよほど期待を裏切られたのが悲しかったのか part probably means something like “The girl was probably sad from having her expectations greatly betrayed”, but how does that work grammatically?
We have:
- 彼女は: Regarding the girl
- よほど期待を裏切られたの: having her expectations greatly betrayed + の which makes it so that this can act as the subject
- が: marks よほど期待を裏切られたの as the subject
- 悲しかった: was sad
- のか: probably
Does that literally mean “For the girl, the experience of having her expectations betrayed was sad, probably”? So not literally “The girl is sad because X”, but “For the girl, X was a sad thing”? Or why is よほど期待を裏切られたの the subject?