Comments on: Star Wars quotes… in Japanese!

By: lu-k

lu-k — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 09:16:24 +0000

Thanks for this entertaining article ^^
May I ask about the well-known phrase which as become something of a running-gag : “I have a bad feeling about this” ?
I have quite an idea of how to formulate it literally, but I was wondering what the “official” dubbed one is?
So far, I did not manage to find it, and among my researches I landed over here ^^

And I must say I find the whole site really interesting, as I try to learn this wonderful language.

By: Lloyd Vincent

Lloyd Vincent — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:38:14 +0000

@ジェニファー: It’s ウーキー
Wikipedia is good for finding the right way to “translate” these kind of words; search in English, then check if it has a Japanese page.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC

@Hikari: I watched them on DVD, not sure if it was special edition or another edition or not… Wookie was ウーキー and the force was フォース.

By: Hikari

Hikari — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:26:09 +0000

May I ask which version of the movie you were watching? I recently watched the Laserdisc widescreen releases and the subtitles were absolutely HORRIBLE. I’ve seen “Wookiee” online as ウーキー　but on the LD it’s 大猿 (big monkey? That’s not quite as exotic as “Wookiee”). When Luke whines about going to the Academy it’s 大学に行きたい (he wants to go to COLLEGE? Again, not quite the “I want to escape from this mundane existance” feeling that we get in the original), and the Force is 理力 (okay, so that’s literally “Force,” but I know it’s フォース in the prequels). It seems that every time they had a chance to make it sound more exotic, they went for some oddly placed Japanese word, stripping the galaxy of some of its uniqueness. This actually reminds me a lot of the translations that you find in older music CDs, even the titles of songs are translated, whereas these days they’ll usually just be written in katakana. I’m wondering if the version I have is maybe the original translation from the 70s… and was it re-translated for the Special Edition? I’ve found quite a bit of discussion about different dubs on Japanese forums, but not much about differences in the subtitles.

By: JayWicky

JayWicky — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:02:36 +0000

While searching for something else entirely on wikipedia, as it often happens, I found that there seems to be several different Japanese dubs for the Star Wars movies. As a for instance, Koichi Yamadera’s wiki page states that he dubbed Han Solo in the “TV Asahi edition” of The Empire Strikes Back. While it is mentioned on Ken’yu Horiuchi’s page that he was the voice artist for Han Solo on the “Nippon TV edition” of Episode IV. That led me to try a Google search on “Star Wars Japanese dubs” and I stumbled upon your blog. Maybe the reason why the subtitle versions are more often quoted than the dubs is that there are too many different dubs to keep track of ?

By: ジェニファー

ジェニファー — Fri, 28 May 2010 23:47:53 +0000

ありがとございました！
Barely-know-katakana Japanese for fun student. My boyfriend asked me, when I was proudly showing him this site: “What’s Wookie?” Couldn’t figure it out with kotoba, and I was certainly expecting ヲキ　or something to that effect.
So, if you would be so kind, what’s Wookie?
ありがとございました

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:15:45 +0000

It’s interesting that　Yoda is based on an old Japanese character, yet he doesn’t accept the idea of trying one’s best. がんばって is after all one of the most common Japanese sentences ever spoken.

By: Lloyd Vincent

Lloyd Vincent — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:24:30 +0000

Glad everyone seems to be enjoying the post!

Recently I realized that ある in its informal negative form typically becomes just ない, so although あらん “sounds” like something we hear often (probably because so many other verbs end that way), あらん itself is actually very rare.

@Justin: I live in Japan so I just rented mine from a local video store. I don’t know anything about streaming or downloading it.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:49:21 +0000

This is great! Excuse me while I squirrel these away in my brain for future retrieval. (I didn’t know あらん could be used like that – learn something new every day, I suppose!)

By: Justin

Justin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:40:58 +0000

Hey where can I find the Star Wars Trilogy (original) as a Japanese dub? Any websites have it to stream or download? Or do I just have to use Amazon Japan or something?

By: Brett

Brett — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:19:57 +0000

It’s great how digging a little further through something you (should) know well enough in English uncovers some real gems. I particularly like your explanation of May the Force be with you, and it’s the quirky Japanese that sounds better for sure.