Over the weekend Star Wars Episode 1 in 3D opened in Japan, so I took my son to see the film. The Phantom Menace isn’t my favorite Star Wars movie — is it anyone’s? — though the fact that my son was at the impressionable age of four when the film first came out tends to make me more charitable towards Episode 1 than most people. One of the more interesting aspects of Star Wars is its use of fictional dialects to flesh out non-human creatures. In case you were wondering how the (annoying) speech of Jar Jar Binks is rendered in Japanese subtitles, I’ll tell you: he speaks more or less normally, but he uses the English words “you” and “me” in katakana to create his trademark strangeness. Yoda’s dialect is a different story: while his odd syntax is one of the most recognizable fictional dialects of English, in Japanese he speaks bland “old man speech” that’s no different from generic old characters in anime. A shame it is, that Japanese fans can’t enjoy the full depth of Yoda.(Incidentally, if you like the images I post here, follow J-List on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr to see full-sized versions of these images and other random pictures I’ll toss up every couple of hours.)
