# 君の勝利は自分で勝ち取れ



## RomantistTaste

Hello everyone!
I have a problem with the following sentence:

君の勝利は自分で勝ち取れ

I attempted a translation saying "You'll gain your victory by putting effort in it".
I found that 勝ち取れ means "to exert oneself and win", so why there's "自分で" if the verb already tells that "yourself" is implied? 
Thank you in advance


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## SpiceMan

勝ちとる is to win + grab... hmm hard to explain, for example an slave fought  to win/grab their freedom. 

That is... you can win your freedom (because you have a great lawyer) or win your freedom because of your own effort => 勝ちとる

So the phrase in question is an order like "win your fights by fighting yourself"... don't know the context but sounds like you can easily add something like "and stop bugging me, because I _won't_ move a finger". Or also something along the line of "it's time for you to grow up and stop relying on me" (a father to his son), etc.

That said... I've never read/heard the expression before so I might be wrong.


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## Hiro Sasaki

RomantistTaste said:


> Hello everyone!
> I have a problem with the following sentence:
> 
> 君の勝利は自分で勝ち取れ
> 
> I attempted a translation saying "You'll gain your victory by putting effort in it".
> I found that 勝ち取れ means "to exert oneself and win", so why there's "自分で" if the verb already tells that "yourself" is implied?
> Thank you in advance


 
"Win victory for you on your own. "

Hiro Sasaki


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## suica

I agree with SpiceMan.
勝ち取る is used when you win something that you cannot gain without effort or many trials.  Effort can be put only by self (does this make sense to you? you put your effort to do something but don't put my/her/his effort) and I think that's why the dictionary uses 'oneself' in the definition.

This means, as you must have wondered, it is okay to say like this:
　彼は勝利を勝ち取った  "He managed to win a victory."

However, as for your example, you cannot omit 自分で because the person telling the phrase is emphasizing that you achieve it by your own.  In other words, the verb 勝ち取る has ONLY the implication of 'by yourself' and without 自分で, the whole sentence could mean "grab your victory but nothing else."

suica


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## RomantistTaste

Now I get the meaning of this sentence.
Thank you so much everybody, all your help is very appreciated


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## Aoyama

*君の勝利は自分で勝ち取れ* is a bit unusual in Japanese, whereas *彼は勝利を勝ち取った* sounds more correct.
This being said 君の勝利は自分で勝ち取れ might be translated as : you have to achieve/manage this victory on your own (a bit strange ...)


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## RomantistTaste

Oh, thanks for the info!
Maybe my difficulty in translating depends on the fact that this is unusual Japanese... maybe poetic license?


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## Flaminius

It sounds to me more like a translator's license than poetic license.  The sentence may have been a translation from a European language.  In a more natural Japanese, the pronoun 君 is seldom used and more so in combination with a verb in imperative.


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## Hiro Sasaki

RomantistTaste said:


> Oh, thanks for the info!
> Maybe my difficulty in translating depends on the fact that this is unusual Japanese... maybe poetic license?


 

It has a smack of a sentence written originally in a European language.
It must be more easier to undestand for Europeans. It can not be said
a poetic expression.

I do not agree with many of your explications. 勝ち取る　is a compound
verb such as 奪い取る、　かすり取る、　もぎ取る、　 取る　means only " to take ".

Only in the whole context of the given sentence, "win" is the best choice,
and suggest some efforts. 


Hiro Sasaki


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## lilhelper

I think a big problem with English  --to--  Japanese and vice versa translations is that most English speakers very informally, so in turn, when we are trying to construct a sentence in Japanese we make errors because we still have the English mind set and not the appropriate "Japanese mind set" while we are constructing these sentences. So our "O.K." slang and informality way of speaking makes sense and is O.K. in our language, once translated, it would mean something incorrect in another language, in this case, Japanese.


Not sure if I meant any sense at all.
Gomen


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