Are these -てから the same?


I just encountered the following sentence:

> A) 祖父は **生まれてから死ぬまで** 、この町に住んでいました。
>
> B) お金を入れてから、このボタンを押してください。

Sentence B says "After you have inserted money, push this button please."  
Sentence A says "From when my grandfather was born till he died, he lived in
this city."

What bothers me is that the two sentences are slightly different from a
conceptual perspective, yet the same grammar seems to be used on them (at
least I haven't learned about any other meaning of てから than in sentence B). In
sentence A, てから marks the beginning of a timespan. This is still just a point
in time, like in sentence B, but since it requires a slightly different
translation, I wondered if the construction in sentence A can still be
regarded the same as in sentence B.

By rearranging the whole sentence, sentence A can be made much more similar to
sentence B: "Concerning my grandfather, after he was born he lived in this
city till he died." So, I might be a bit meticulous on this, but I just wanted
to be sure I'm not overlooking something.




Perhaps it would help if sentence A were translated a bit differently:

> A) 祖父は生まれてから死ぬまで、この町に住んでいました。  
>  My grandfather lived in this town from birth until death.

Personally, I think this is the most idiomatic rendering in English. Though
some may not like that I rendered what was a verb in Japanese as a noun in
English, I think it can be helpful at some point to recognize that English
likes using nouns where Japanese likes to use verbs. That isn't to say it
can't be said the other way around in either language; often it can.

You could also translate it using the "after"

> After he was born up until he died, my grandfather lived in this town.

It perhaps helps to think of _verb_ てから as the starting point after which
something else happens: in that sense, either "after" or "from" can be a good
translation.

The constructions in both sentences **A** and **B** are the same regarding
_verb_ てから.




Perhaps it would help if sentence A were translated a bit differently:

> A) 祖父は生まれてから死ぬまで、この町に住んでいました。  
>  My grandfather lived in this town from birth until death.

Personally, I think this is the most idiomatic rendering in English. Though
some may not like that I rendered what was a verb in Japanese as a noun in
English, I think it can be helpful at some point to recognize that English
likes using nouns where Japanese likes to use verbs. That isn't to say it
can't be said the other way around in either language; often it can.

You could also translate it using the "after"

> After he was born up until he died, my grandfather lived in this town.

It perhaps helps to think of _verb_ てから as the starting point after which
something else happens: in that sense, either "after" or "from" can be a good
translation.

The constructions in both sentences **A** and **B** are the same regarding
_verb_ てから.

