何年か前の話ですが、 ディズニーランドで子供がトイレに入って、出てくるのを外で待ってると、 トイレ内で髪を染められ、服も着替えさせられて子供が誘拐された、ディズニーランドでは 出入り口を全て封鎖して、犯人が見つかったとか、 そのまま子供がいなくなっちゃったとか 結構聞きましたが、 その話本当ですか？
Hello, again, I'm translating colloquial japanese. Why did the author of this post use とか? Why didn't he use て? Is there a special connection between the two verbs 見つかった andいなくなっちゃった? I don't understand whether they are connected to 結構聞きました or not (there's a space in the original text before 結構). Also, how can I translate 結構 here?
結構 is used here in sense 4 from EDICT:
- quite; reasonably; fairly; tolerably
とか could be roughly translated as "things like". On the more analytic level, it is a combination of the quoting と and か. I.e., here the author is quoting the things they've heard:
I've heard plenty of stories like "they found the culprit" or "The child just disappeared like that", but is [any of them] true?
て could have been used if it was describing the actual sequence of events, but since here it's hearsay it doesn't really work. Also, it seems that "they found the culprit" and "The child just disappeared like that" are two conflicting storylines and not sequential events, so て doesn't work here.
とか here means an indefinite list. 結構 here means to have heard these things a lot (see some of the synonymous constructions here http://thesaurus.weblio.jp/content/%E7%B5%90%E6%A7%8B)
so
犯人が見つかったとか、
= things like they caught the culprit
そのまま子供がいなくなっちゃったとか
= or things like the children disappeared
結構聞きましたが、 その話本当ですか？
are things that I often heard, but is this story true?
Because the author heard the story from another source, he doesn't remember what he was told word for word. He uses とか to explain that that's the general idea he understood from the source, which may (/not) have told him the complete and detailed story behind how they found the offender, and how the children were already gone by then.
I don't know of any special connection between the two verbs.
The space before 結構 is like a colloquial '。' or '，' . The author just wants to state a break in his speech.
結構聞きましたが
I'd try something like "I've been asking around but..."
