The result is something approaching poetry, and is almost always hilarious.įrom the point of view of a linguist, some of the phrases that have resulted from this process are fascinating to unpick. Not so remarkable you might think? Where things get really interesting though, is in the subtitle options for this version of the film, which include subtitles in English that, for reasons we will perhaps never know, are not the original English dialogue transcribed, but are a machine-produced back-translation into English of the Chinese translation. Certainly however, the entertainment value of the film was greatly increased when someone in China released a bootlegged version of the film translated (we can only assume badly) into Chinese. Opinion is definitely divided on this particular entry in the Star Wars saga, especially amongst die-hard fans, and I think it would be fair to say that very few people would consider the film’s dialogue to be one of the finest examples of English screenwriting.
Most people these days are familiar with the Star Wars movies, including 2005’s Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. This is especially true of course if the translations are not done properly in the first place. However, as anyone who has ever played a game of ‘Chinese whispers’ can tell you, this is not always going to guarantee you a good result. The general idea is that the back-translation is a way of checking that the original meaning of the source text has not been ‘lost in translation’ by comparing the back-translation to the text you started out with.
These days, the idea of back-translation, translating from one language into another and then back again, is generally frowned on by experienced linguists.
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