Spoken translation challenge

[FredKore]

Sometimes the smallest sentences give me the most questions.
I recently discovered (through Bunpro forums) a treasure trove of translated shows on Disney+. I like listening to the translations of familiar shows and think about why they chose certain phrases.

In one scene in “Riley’s First Date?”, the husband is daydreaming and gets snapped back to reality, and he tries to act normal.
In English, he says, “Uh, yeah. Um… I’ll… go fix the table.”
In Japanese, he says, あっ、じゃ、テーブルでも直すとするか
(it might be 直すってするか. there’s no subtitles)

If I had to translate, I would’ve said テーブルを直そう

• Why did they choose でも instead of を?
• Why did they choose 直すとするか instead of 直そう?
• What Bunpro grammar point does this fall under? I don’t think it’s this: にする | Japanese Grammar SRS

Any pointers here is appreciated.

[EbonyMidget]

My first thought is that the translation needs to express the uncertain tone in the second sentence, caused by the “um” and the “…” , that makes it sound like he’s thinking as he speaks. So the でも and とするか makes the sentence sound more appropriately uncertain. でも making the table less decidedly the object and とするか making it a question.

[s1212z]

When I first read, it looked like an uncertain decision which I think is partially true. But stack exchange had some comments on dictionary form ＋とする, with their example they have " to proceed to perform a new action (by quitting what one is currently doing)" which I think makes sense to the nuance of this context from the day dream to the table action.

Good topic, I didn’t know this nuance and is much different than verb (vol)とする or にする but I can still hear the ‘decide to aspect’. Like @EbonyMidget said, the か give a confused tone…I think this is correct, SE responses are random sometimes so never 100% on the source or who is commenting.

What does verb+とする mean?

[Asher]

My description may be a tiny bit different, but I think it still fits in with the stack exchange stuff. As for the でも it’s just removing certainty as @EbonyMidget said. It reflects the ‘Uh … Yeah …’ well.

For とする, I almost always see it like this. It’s a far weaker destinstion than にする. にする speaks as if you are already at the destination of your action (firmly decided), whereas とする, speaks as if there really is no destination yet, but you are just stating something that could result if you were to proceed with whatever you said before と.

So in a sentence like this, とする comes across to me as ‘could/possibly’. ‘I guess I could/ I’ll possibly go fix the table or something’. As it removes the fixed ‘resolution’ toward the action that に gives.

This may or may not help