Postby thegooseking » July 4th, 2016 9:43 am
kyra.chandlerさん、
My instinct would be simply that there's an implied の in there - 先手必勝のスマイル - which would make 先手必勝 into an adjective. Turning an expression into an adjective is indeed difficult to translate, so we have to be a bit liberal. "A smile that comes with victory-through-initiative" is still a pretty clunky translation, but I think it's along the right lines.
I'd be tempted to more idiomatically translate it as "smiling like the cat that got the cream" though I'm not sure if that idiom really captures the sense of initiative - I guess in my mind it implies that there are other cats that didn't get the cream because that cat got there first, but we do use it in cases where making the first move isn't implied, e.g. "He did well in his exams so he's smiling like the cat that got the cream." My sense would be that 先手必勝スマイル is more literal than that. Maybe we could mix our idioms and instead say "smiling like the early bird that got the worm", but there's still that word 'like' that implies it's less literal than it actually is. So perhaps, "the smile of the early bird that got the worm".
小狼
