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Star Wars Episode 4 To Be Dubbed In Navajo
New submitter Unixnoteunuchs writes "Coming to a theater in Window Rock in the Navajo Nation on July 4, 2013, Star Wars Episode 4 dubbed in the Navajo language. This is the first time a major motion picture has ever been dubbed in a native American language. This effort will help the Navajo nation preserve its cultural heritage in its language, a complex and beautiful Athabaskan tongue heavily reliant on adjectives and compound words. Listen to this article and how 'computer' and 'droid' would translate."
Dub in Navajo.
Show it in Japan.
Just to piss them off.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
How does dubbing a movie that has nothing to do with Navajo culture help preserve Navajo culture? Not trying to troll, I am asking honestly. It seems a bit insulting, the insinuation being that the whole of their culture is distilled down to their native language.
Hope they checked to make sure they weren't accidentally calling down a fire mission on the theater's location.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So what?
Star wars has been dubbed to much more obscure languages before!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCDb8g_kuu0
bickerdyke
If that's what's required to keep Jar Jar Binks quiet then it's fine by me.
On the plus side, Wookiee language would be as expressive in Navajo as it is in English.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Will Navajo even have words for space ships, robots and laser beams...?
They'd probably pinch a few words from WWII-era code talker lingo or something. Hand grenades were called the translation of "potatoes", tanks were "turtles", bombers were "buzzards", submarines were "iron fish", etc.
They said how to say "computer" in Navajo, but not how to say "droid". They only explained that R2D2 would be a concept along the lines of "metal thing on wheels that is alive".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think it's a great idea, although I would have chosen Empire. But after seeing and hearing the bluray quality of the remastered ep4 I hope they use the new remastered bluray audio. Heck I know every line from that movie backwards and forward from my misspent youth, I could probably still enjoy the film in Navaho. I sometimes enjoy watching it in foreign languages. If you watch the bluray in a non English language the initial crawl text is in that language, not just subtitled, but the actual crawl is in the foreign language. It would be good publicity for Lucasfilm / Disney to take the Navaho text and run it through their crawl macro for free. Lucasfilm used to be super touchy about this sort of thing, maybe Disney could be more magnanimous.
TODO create witty sig.
If they're going to need to make up words to cover words like computer and droid, it sounds like they're doing the opposite.
I don't think so... their culture managed to resist somehow the contact with palefaces, firewater and fire horse. No wonder the R2D2 is translated as "the short metal thing that's alive" - listen at about 2'30".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It is diflicult to formulate the native idea expressed in this word ... Wakonda that is the permeating life of visible nature -- an invisible life and power that reaches everywhere and everything and can be appealed to by man to send him help.
You quite often see this translated as "Great Spirit" or "Great Maker", and treated as if it was merely a quaint native term for the Judeo-Christian God.
If that's what's required to keep Jar Jar Binks quiet then it's fine by me.
Good heavens, man! This is Episode IV, not Episode I!
When Lucasfilm proposed dubbing the films 'in their true order', the reply was "That's the worst 'help' we've been offered since Lord Jeffrey Amherst showed up!"
I don't recall seeing Jar Jar Binks in Episode 4...
I would like to get an English translation of the Navajo spoken in the movie Cheyenne Autumn by the Navajo actors. I understand that it is very funny. It is ribald and obscene as well as just plain funny. The Navajo apparently enjoy watching the movie because of that.
History is so yesterday!
I think I'll wait for the subbed version. Subtitles are always better.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Dubbed In Navajo
FFS, Avatar was just a movie. Get over yourselves.
Summation 2
It is the best "open" code language. Used in the Pacific theatre in WWII.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Haven't the Native Americans been punished enough by the white man's foolery as it is?
And Star Wars relates to the Navajo cultural heritage how exactly?
If they're going to need to make up words to cover words like computer and droid, it sounds like they're doing the opposite.
I expect that by now they've already come up with a word for Computer. As I understand it, they came up with distinct Navajo names for each of the myriad parts of the automotive internal combustion engine. My kind of people.
As for "droid", it wasn't even an English word before Star Wars. Sure it's merely an abbreviated form of "android", but the actual word "droid" wasn't part of the common language. If we can add words, so can they.
That's what protocol droids are there for. Let me know when they translate it into Bocce.
Boba Fett wasn't in it, either, and he's the character they used in the picture.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There's a difference between "dubbing" and "merely including a snippet of" a language in a movie.
Unlike, say, Finnish, where the Finns will typically just take an English or Swedish, Russian, &c word and spin the pronounciation to expand their tongue, the Navajo typically create a new compound word that is a description. This is a rather laborious way to rapidly expand a language. A fun example is the Navajo word for "Dog," ééch'í. That literally means "one who eats poop."
Outsiders like most of us can't cause a traditional language to adapt. The burden is on the speakers. In this case, teaching English as a second language (or French or w/e) is a better solution than trying to quickly and drastically expand a language spoken by so few, then figuring out how to translate every time we need to interact.
The Navajo language was only written in the 20th century. Even if we were able to fully expand Navajo to cover conversation with the same breadth and depth of a multicultural language like English/French/etc., and if further we could somehow teach all of the new words to all of the Navajo-speaking Indians right away, then if they don't have for instance any Navajo cabinetmakers who use the new words for cabinetry tools all the time, all those related words would die in a few years. After a decade or two, we'd be left very nearly where we are now.
Language is a living thing, and words that are long unspoken die. It's a pity, but at a certain point, a nearly dead language becomes a cultural relic, as Navajo is today. Preservation of this as a cultural relic is great, but not easy.
It appears the limited character set on Slashdot is also contributing to the demise of the Navajo tongue. The "L" and "A" derived characters won't come through. The word is written here for those that are interested:
http://www.native-languages.org/navajo_words.htm
Why not? The English language managed to handle the Czech word "robotnik" (see: Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.)) .
When I was a kid I saw the movie dubbed in nahuatl. It probably was not an official translation but it was done. I also foudn this Hollywood movie by Warner brothers Jesus and is dubbed in quechua Here is a scene in Quechua Here is the same scene in English
The source article is very careful to identify Navajo as a "North American Indigenous language". There is a difference, so please don't disparage the English as a non-native language.
-- Jimtown Kelly
When the dub it into Ngungar let me know!!! (It's an Australian Aboriginal language).
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)