Star Wreck: in The Pirkinning - Translation

Translation

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning contains humour in many levels, from word play and short gags to character parodies and a black comedy story line.

The Star Trek spoof material is mostly inherited from the earlier Star Wreck films. The core of them date back to the first Star Wreck animation from the time when Torssonen and his friends were in their early teens. Consequently, some of the Star Trek spoofs have a distinct teen-age feel.

A lot of the word-level humour is based on humorous mistranslation. For example, the alien race Minbari from Babylon 5 universe is referred to as Minibar.

For most of the Star Trek and science fiction terminology there exists corresponding terminology in Finnish, due to the large amount of science fiction and Star Trek that has been translated to Finnish. Star Wreck takes these established translations and twists them: for example, a phaser is conventionally translated as vaiheinen ("that which has phases"), while the Wreck equivalent is tuikutin (literally, "a thing that can cause twinkling"). Similarly, warp is conventionally translated as poimu ("tuck", especially of a garment), while Wreck uses kieroutuminen (literally, "twisting" or "becoming perverse," depending on the intended meaning).

These mistranslation puns are impossible to translate to English effectively, though the English subtitles do try to create different puns (twinkler instead of phaser, twist for warp, etc.). Likewise, "photon torpedoes" have become simply "light balls", and wormhole a "maggot hole". Emperor Pirk himself has apparently a bad understanding of various words, such as using "resorts" for "resources": the original Finnish wording uses "resorit", meaning "sleeve ends" instead of correct "resurssit".

The case of Mikhail Garybrandy is a prime example of an untranslatable spoof. The Finnish name of the character is Mihail Karigrandi, which is a reference to a fictional character Kari Grandi (played by Eeki Mantere), whose adventures for the good of thirsty people (bringing them the Grandi-brand juice to drink) were depicted in a long-running Finnish TV commercial series. The tagline of the commercials, "Kari Grandi, kaikkien janoisten sankari, aikamme legenda" ("Kari Grandi, the hero of all who are thirsty, a legend in our time") was paraphrased by Garybrandy in his line "Olenhan kaikkien janoisten sankari... aikamme legenda" (roughly, "After all, I am the hero of all who are thirsty... a legend in our time") spoken near the end of the movie. This is funny also because Garibaldi was an alcoholic and Garybrandy takes to drink again in the movie, and drinking is often glorified in the Finnish (male) culture. The words "hero" and "legend" are very often used in relation to drinking alcohol; "hero" is used sarcastically to mean a bungler or anti-hero (often used in a friendly male bonding fashion) and "legend" refers to all kinds of (spectacularly) goofy things people do when under the influence, or the said people.

As a spoof of both Star Trek: The Original Series and the Finnish language, the engineer of the Potkustart (credited in the English credits as "the Scottish engineer") speaks Finnish in a heavy Turku dialect. This parodies Montgomery Scott's speaking in Lowland Scots. The corresponding English subtitles have indeed been rendered into Lowland Scots.

Translations of subtitles can be found at reasonmaker.