Saga Lost in Translation

Hi,

because this planet is located far away from the blessed realm called the Skyriver galaxy there are some beings that don't understand Galactic Basic Standard. So this thread is about the errors, mistakes and changes made in non-english translations of Star Wars.

I saw Star Wars in the German dub first and now never again, because...

The Phantom Menace (Die dunkle Bedrohung = The Dark Menace):
- Emotions and feelings are both translated as feelings, the same word so it's impossible to notice a difference and you think that the Jedi are constantly contradicting themselves.
- Jar Jar seems to be even more dumb. Yes, this is possible.
- C3-PO's voice in the PT is another one than in the OT.

Attack of the Clones (Angriff der Klonkrieger = Attack of the Clone Warriors)
- Cliegg Lars says "Ich kann nicht mal mehr auf einem Pferd reiten", meaning "I can't ride a horse anymore", because "to ride" is called "reiten" in German but can only mean riding animals, not swoop bikes, cars, trains, planes et cetera.
- At the end Yoda says "Begonnen der Angriff der Klonkrieger hat", "Begun the attack of the clone warriors has" instead of "Begun the clone war has".
- Anakin Skywalker sounds a bit gay.

Revenge of the Sith (Die Rache der Sith)
- The Jedi starfighters on the Invisible Hand are called "Jedi-Kämpfer" meaning "Jedi warriors" by the B2 battle droids, because the translators thought Jedi fighters mean Anakin and Obi-Wan, not there starfighters.

A New Hope (Eine neue Hoffnung)
- Lighsabers are usually called "Laserschwerter" meaning "Laserswords" in all movies. If not so then they are swords, too, Lichtschwerter what means lightsword, never sabers. This is so in all Star Wars works, not only movies.
- They are from a more civilicized age, not for.
- Kessel is called Korsal, because "Kessel" has a meaning in German, so some people could get confused.
- In the German language there are three different grammatical genders, for the Millenium Falcon the male is used and not the female one which is usually used to call ships.
- The Falcon's maximum speed is 50% over lightspeed, the translators didn't know what "0.5 past lightspeed" means and interpretented it like "0,5 or 50% over the lightspeed"
- Two sentences haven't got translated and don't appear in the movies, it's one by Luke Skywalker onboard the Death Star and one by him too in his conversion with Han on Yavin IV.
- The time until the Death Star fires has been changed to better fit the lips, instead of 15 seconds the bord computer says 2 minutes.

The Empire Strikes Back (Das Imperium schlägt zurück)
- Darth Vader has three different voices in this movie.
- Palpatine's voice in the DVD edition is another one than in the PT and ROTJ.
- "Nerv herder" is translated to "Wookiee slaver".

Return of the Jedi (Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter = The Return of the Jedi Knights)
- In the theatrical release Tatooine is written as Tattuin in the opening scroll.
- Bib Fortuna's words have not been dubbed.
- One sentence sounds much better, instead of "Now his failure is complete" Vader says "Bei allem was er angestrebt, hat er nun eine endgültige Niederlage erlitten", this would translate into "At all that he has used to do, now he has suffered an infinite failure".
- Luke is called "Mister Luke" by Threepio one time, not Master Luke.

I only know the German translation, but in other languages there have been made translation errors and unneccessary changes, too.

Beside the movies, there many mistakes more, like dumb sounding titles (Edge of Conquest I = Anakin und die Yuuzhan Vong, literally "Anakin and the Yuuzhan Vong), names translated different in the books, so you don't notice two characters or starships are the same one, untranslatetible puns and in some novels the translators have changed the gender of a character, done with Cilghal and Tahiri.

Adrian the Cool

 

Mind-boggling.

 

Ouch, I bet Chewbacca didn't think that was very funny.

 

Interesting stuff, thanks for posting that!

 

Interesting, very specific interpretation of just what the 'Jedi' in the title referred to.

 

In spanish, Return of the Jedi is translated in singular (return of the (single) Jedi), but Revenge of the Sith is plural (revenge of the (many) sith).

 

Instructive.

I like that one :
- The Jedi starfighters on the Invisible Hand are called "Jedi-Kämpfer" meaning "Jedi warriors" by the B2 battle droids, because the translators thought Jedi fighters mean Anakin and Obi-Wan, not there starfighters.

There's a couple in the French dubbed version of the OT :

ANH
- instead of "Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force" by Kenobi, the translation goes "Vader was bribed by the enemies of the Force" ("Vador a été soudoyé par les adversaires de la Force")...No mention of the dark side at all. Although the sentence sounds pretty well in French actually, the meaning is rather different then.
- the Clone Wars is translated by the Black Wars (la Guerre Noire).
- the Death Star has become the Black Star (l'Etoile Noire). Probably to better match with lips movement here. They switched back to Death Star (l'Etoile de la Mort) for ROTJ though.
- Chewbacca is named Chiquetaba (Chico instead of Chewie)...? It's Chewbacca and Chewie for ESB and ROTJ.


ESB
- When Veers says to Vader "the fleet has moved out of lightspeed", it's wrongly translated as "the fleet has moved beyond lightspeed". Vader saying "Admiral Ozzel came out of lightspeed too close to the system" is again translated as "Ozzel as topped lightspeed too close to the system". Apparently they had trouble understanding what this was all about.
- Jabba is named "Jabba the Forest man"...This one is quite mind-boggling. If I'm correct it's only Jabba in the original version on the more.

I don't know regarding the PT, as I'm not used to the French dubbed version for those films. I prefer the original voices by far.

 

The PT is generally "more unified" in non-english version than the OT, because by the time of Episode I Lucasfilm controlled foreign versions religiously (it shows in the different interpretations for ROTJ but the same for ROTS). It was Lucasfilm who cast all the various voice actors and determined almost everything.
In 1977, they didn't have the power or the resources to do that.

 

double post

 

triple post, sorry