Gather 'round, kiddos! It's story-time with CatBus.
So a conversation with Sadako started me thinking about all of the interesting and unexpected things a person learns when diving into a new language (such as: "jedi" means "to eat" in Croatian, which leads to some translation issues), and I thought I'd share one of the ones that I thought was neat.
So, first off, we have this unverified Simplified Mandarin fansub. I suspect it's actually very good because I could tell whoever did it was very thorough and loved Star Wars, but I just can't say for certain if the Chinese was very good.
One of the interesting things about these Chinese subtitles is how they incorporate foreign words, such as Jawa. There are, as you probably know, thousands of Chinese characters, and quite a lot of them can be pronounced as some variation on "ja" or "wa". So a translator finds two characters that make those sounds, and if they're good, they choose two characters that actually can describe the thing in question.
"Wa" is easy. The character for "baby" is pronounced "wa", Jawas are small people and kinda cute, so that's that. "Ja" on the other hand... well, this translator chose "claw". So Jawas are "claw babies"...
...which is pretty accurate actually, but it somehow makes me think about an alternate version of Star Wars made by David Cronenberg, where claw babies would fit right in. Also, it makes some lines a little funny, like Luke asking, "Why would the Empire want to slaughter claw babies?" Gee, I dunno, Luke. Self-defense? Because they're an abomination? To kill them before they grow and multiply? I can think of plenty of reasons.
Anyway, that's just a language tidbit I thought was interesting and a little funny. There are plenty of others, I'm sure, if I think about it.