Backstroke of the West

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Patrick Shanley, "'Revenge of the Sith' Dubbed With Bootleg Chinese Dialogue Is a Fan-Made Masterpiece", The Hollywood Reporter 1/3/2017:

YouTuber GratefulDeadpool has done the unthinkable: He's made Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith cool.

Using the original Chinese subtitles, which feature multiple lost-in-translation misinterpretations, GratefulDeadpool redubbed the prequel trilogy's final installment — with hilarious results.

Entitled Backstroke of the West Highlights Part 1 (Star War: The Third Gathers), the recut features such memorable lines as "I has been hating you," from the villainous Count Dooku, and "The front is a lemon avenue flying straightly," spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi while piloting a careening starship.

Dorkly explains the bizarre translations likely "began with a machine translation of the Chinese script to [Revenge of the Sith], which attempted to literally translate from Mandarin to English, despite the multitude of barriers between the two languages." The end result was great quips, such as "Smelly boy" from General Grievous to Kenobi and "Your dead period arrived, teacher" from a rebellious Anakin Skywalker during his fateful lightsaber duel with his master on Mustafar.

I covered the original Chinese DVD subtitles in "Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection", 7/17/2005, where I quoted favorite lines like

"He big in nothing / important in good elephant"
"I hope that these dreamses really can't become"
"Send these troopseses only"
"I was just made by the Presbyterian Church" (= Jedi Council)
"Ratio tile, the wish power are together with you" (="Obi Wan, may the Force be with you")

I'm skeptical of the machine-translation idea, because I seriously doubt that there has ever been an MT system that rendered "the Jedi Council" as "the Presbyterian Church". There are some things that still require human creativity.

The whole thing:



17 Comments

  1. Backstroke of the West • Zhi Chinese said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 9:12 am

    […] Source: Language Backstroke of the West […]

  2. Aaron said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 10:16 am

    I agree that the machine translation was almost certainly embellished by humans. It's much funnier than your bog-standard Google translate dump, which tends to be either unintelligible, or close enough to the original that it's not much of a laugh.

    I notice that in the years since this first made the rounds, machine translation has improved enough that people are having to put their messages through multiple rounds of Google translate just to get it messed up enough to justify a cheap "har har isn't it funny that languages can't be translated word for word" posting (a genre of humour that normally leaves me cold, though Backstroke of the West is an exceptional example of it – again, likely because of human editing).

  3. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 12:55 pm

    Well, at least "Smelly boy" (chou4 xiao3zi 臭小子) and "Your dead period arrived" (ni3de si3qi1 dao4le 你的死期到了) are transparently machine-translation-type results. Ten seconds of listening reveals more ("good kind of" = hao3 yang4de 好樣的 ['that's the way it's done' / 'that's what I'm talking about!']). So embellishment would have to be demonstrated case by case. I have the Chinese DVD somewhere…

  4. Lance Nathan said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 1:15 pm

    I notice that in the years since this first made the rounds, machine translation has improved enough that people are having to put their messages through multiple rounds of Google translate just to get it messed up enough to justify a cheap "har har isn't it funny that languages can't be translated word for word" posting (a genre of humour that normally leaves me cold, though Backstroke of the West is an exceptional example of it – again, likely because of human editing).

    The two things about this that strike me are:

    1. A major difference between Backstroke of the West and someone trying to get Google Translate to mangle text is that the former is an actual result that came from someone who was trying to be comprehensible, rather than trying to be incomprehensible.

    2. As someone who has tried to rely on Google Translate to at least give him the gist of text in Arabic and Korean, I'm not sure that machine translation has improved all that much. What has changed is that, once upon a time, you could put a movie title or song title into Google Translate, send it into another language and back, and get gibberish, and now you're less likely to–but not because translation has improved. Rather, GT seems to have expanded its parallel corpus enough that, instead of translating popular titles word for word, it can look up the title in the other language. (For instance, in Swedish, "mörkrets" means "darkness" and "hämnd" means "revenge", but Google Translate renders "Mörkrets Hämnd" as "Revenge of the Sith".) The farther you get from text that GT has evidence of as an exact phrase, the more likely it is that it will mangle the meaning right away.

  5. Lazar said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 2:25 pm

    "Do not want" (and sometimes its converse, "do want") became a staple of chanspeak in the 2000s.

  6. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 2:29 pm

    So it's actually the general incomprehensibility of the dialogue which makes this unlikely to have been subject to much editing. (Plus the fact that it's a veritable catalogue of classic machine translation errors, many of which would require a certain level of linguistic sophistication to manufacture: 呆 used for dai1 'wait' in Chinese translated as 'foolish', 好象 [sic.] 'it would appear' translated as 'good elephant', etc.) The wiki article says that the back-machine-translated text was part of an early Chinese bootleg; comments at the Youtube video suggest the same. This latest editor's genius was to get voice actors to read it with straight faces.

  7. David Marjanović said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 2:50 pm

    Finally I learn where "Do not want" comes from!!!

  8. AntC said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 3:36 pm

    Per the recent XKCD strip, I've never watched a Star Wars movie. (Only a few trailers/clips.)

    Are these translations any less drivel than the original script?

    At 7:30 the light-saber hand-to-hand combat against skeletons(?) strongly reminds me of a battle in Jason and Argonauts, that my grandfather took me to see sometime in the '60s.

  9. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 5:46 pm

    @AntC: As the content of the dialogue now fits the original performances and general unbearable camp, this change makes the movie infinitely more watchable.
    "Do not hear his, Allah Gold" 别听他的, 阿拉金
    "Make him live down too dangerous" 让他活下去太危险了
    Sheer Allah Gold :D :D :D Many thanks for the link; enjoyable writing breaks all day today…

  10. Ken said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 10:48 pm

    Of Yoda's dialogue translation and backtranslation interesting would be, yes?

  11. S Frankel said,

    January 15, 2017 @ 10:51 pm

    @AntC – The first movie was dubbed into Navajo, and in an interview, the translators said that the biggest problem they had wasn't matching the lip movements as closely as possible, nor translating some of the concepts ("We can do 'sand people'"). They said, in all seriousness, the biggest problem they had was that a lot of George Lucas's dialog doesn't make any sense.

    (p.s. "Sand people" turned out to be a simple nominal compound, séí diné.)

  12. A triumph of world culture « Samizdata said,

    January 16, 2017 @ 7:57 am

    […] I see that Mark Liberman of Language Log has flagged up this piece by Patrick Shanley for the Hollywood […]

  13. Ralph Hickok said,

    January 16, 2017 @ 8:19 am

    I gather that's an actual footage from the movie? It must be a really, really bad movie. It looks like something Ed Wood would have made if he had had enough money to do the special effects.

  14. Chas Belov said,

    January 16, 2017 @ 2:23 pm

    So far as I'm concerned, there are only two Star Wars movies, episodes 4 and 7.

    I'm not so sure that AI translation is that good. Google's translation of To Samo by Czech pop group Jananas, while it gives much of the context, is still a grammar mishmash.

  15. Matt McIrvin said,

    January 16, 2017 @ 8:49 pm

    @AntC: @Ralph Hickok: The prequels were… not the best Star Wars movies, by general consensus. (Though Episode III was probably the best one of the prequels.)

  16. Lane said,

    January 17, 2017 @ 9:12 am

    I thought "Jedi Council" to "Presbyterian Church" would be pretty plausible, if the Chinese were something like "council of elders" ("presbyteros"). But it isn't. It appears simply to be Juédì yìhuì (絕地議會), something like "Jedi Parliament".

  17. Matt McIrvin said,

    January 17, 2017 @ 2:14 pm

    @Aaron: In Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel Galactic Pot-Healer, he actually predicted that bored office workers would abuse crappy network-based machine translation as a way of goofing off. (They'd do a forward-and-back translation and challenge their distant friends, over what we would now recognize as the Internet, to guess what the original phrase was.)

    PKD was probably inspired by early jokes about machine translation back when the subject was still at the stage of the crudest experiments ("out of sight, out of mind" becoming "invisible idiot", etc.)

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