Backstroke of the West

Digital Public Library of America 2017-01-19

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: