Star Wars in Welsh

 

The first Star Wars film, A New Hope, is set to be given a Welsh language version. This is not to be confused with the very amusing "Taff Wars" videos; these are amateur YouTube Anglo-Welsh spoofs, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPM1v2nUkWA.  Star Wars- Gobaith Newydd, will not be on the big screen, but it will be broadcast on S4C. The cast will include some famous names as voice actors including Rhys Ifans, best known for Notting Hill, and Mark Lewis Jones who played a supporting role in JJ Abrams' sequel trilogy. I'm hoping this will be a better quality production than previous ones that switch language. This is not the first time Star Wars has been dubbed into other languages. I recall watching a German version as a child on Dutch TV. Dubbing used to mean that the viewer was put off by the fact that the shape of the actors' mouths did not match the speech they were hearing. This must be a particular problem for the hearing-impaired who have to lip-read. These days modern video editing should be able to manipulate the visuals to change the actors' mouths so that they sync with their dialogue. This has been a major news story, but should it really? All the Star Wars movies have been dubbed before; into German, like I said, but also French, Spanish and Japanese. I suppose the novelty comes from the fact that Welsh is not a world language and is in fact only spoken in Wales, with a few clusters in the diaspora, especially in Argentina and the USA. About a million people speak it as a first language, but probably at least that many speak it as a second language, including myself although I'm very rusty after all these years in Oxford. Welsh language education is pushed very vigorously in Wales, helped by some negative pressure that I don't approve of, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/10/cvd-is-ruining-wales.html.

The franchise has been dubbed into other smaller local languages like Swedish and Czech. (Amusing fact: If it ever gets a Norwegian one then Yoda's strange dialect will make sense because Norway's language has an object-subject-verb construction too.) This Welsh language version must come with challenges, the same ones faced by the writers of the "Anglish" script, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/03/star-wars-in-anglish.html. There are some terms in Star Wars that are unique to the franchise such as "droid", meaning an intelligent robot. They can't just use the same word droed, because that means "foot". They might just have to fall back on robot, which is an English loanword. We'll see. The notion of Star Wars in Welsh is completely canon. The story is set a long time ago in a galaxy far far way. Even though most of the characters are physically identical to humans, probably though some kind of parallel evolution, they are technically aliens and would not really be speaking the language the viewer hears. They primarily speak "Galactic Basic", a lingua franca that emerged out of the native tongues of Coruscant and the other "core worlds". Any human language can be substituted for that in the script for the convenience of the filmmakers and the comprehension of the audience. I look forward to watching this, only on Iplayer seeing as I don't live in Wales. I intend to keep the subtitles off and see how much I can still understand.