The Mighty Chewbacca - The Force Awakens (Spoilers)

[ancient]

Anakin was able to understand it. Luke seemed to at least a little, at least when R2 was plugged into his X-Wing, though that could have been due to some unseen translator in his helmet or something.

There is a deleted scene from ROTS wherein it shows that the little communication device Anakin uses to call R2 actually has a translate function. This is on Dooku's ship. When it temporarily malfunctions, there is a brief comedic bit where Anakin & ObiWan argue over what they think he's saying, which implies they kind of understand him, but not fluently.

It's on YouTube.

Maybe not technically canon, but I think it shows the intent.

 

[Arrrrgggh]

Possibly. But Binary is still an established language in the setting, just one a lot of people don't put much effort into learning. Unlike Basic, which nearly everyone at least understands. Finn even indirectly suggests as much when he admits he never learned it, meaning it was a possibility. And of course both Poe and Rey understood it just fine.

It's really no different than Wookiee (or it's three sublanguages if you really want to get nerdy) in that regard, or any of the other obscure alien races we hear in the movies, like Rodian.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'm sorry, I completely forgot that humans were able to understand beepese (or whatever it's called). I always thought only droids could.

(That last message I posted, I hadn't seen Force Awakens yet.)

 

[Set Harth]

Do we really hear Rodian in the movies, or do we hear a Rodian speaking Huttese?

 

[Arrrrgggh]

It's not like they actually announce what language anyone is speaking. Chewie could be speaking Mandalorian for all we really know. But unless they state otherwise, there's no reason to assume it's anything other than their native language or Basic.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

What about the two headed announcer guy in TPM? The Greg Proops head speaks English, what about the other one? (And is he translating what Greg is saying, or just doing his own thing?)

 

[Arrrrgggh]

Again, unless it's implied to be something else, probably whatever native language the two-headed alien speaks. Or more likely, Huttese in that particular case due to the nature of the event, but there's nothing to actually back that up.

 

[The Old Mixer]

But it seems that 3PO had a memory wipe, or at least some kind of electronic brain fart, at some point off-screen in ANH.

Toward the beginning, when the Tantive IV is under attack, he says "There'll be no escape for the princess this time."

But later, when R2 plays the holographic recording of the princess, 3PO doesn't recognize her. He says, "I think she was a passenger on our last voyage. A person of some importance, I believe."

That was 3PO being evasive because he and Artoo were privy to sensitive information that they didn't think their new master needed to know. Lucas had originally wrote 3PO as more of a slick used car salesman type, and had intended to have him voiced as such, but they liked what Anthony Daniels was doing with the dialogue so much that they switched gears. If one reads or listens to 3PO's dialogue in ANH with that in mind, it becomes clear just how much he's bullshitting Luke and Owen on Tatooine. Even as a kid, long before I read about this, I always felt like they'd changed his personality between ANH and TESB...that's because they started writing him to suit Anthony Daniels's "fussy butler" delivery for TESB.

 

[Trekker4747]

Hmmmm.... I'll have to watch ANH again and have that in mind, with 3PO being intentionally elusive; because I always wondered about some of the inconsistencies as well but assumed he was being uncompletely forthcoming, though that struck me as also unlikely given the droids likely would have been programmed with some manner of thruthfulness to their "masters" particularly with the restraining bolt on them.

It does but 3PO's vouching for R2 with Luke/Owen when 3PO at this point knows very well how unreliable R2 is; and then later 3PO seems to sort-of go back on that notion when he speaks of "these R2 units being nothing but trouble" after R2 escapes. It really does sound like something a used car salesman would say, talking out of both sides of his mouth.

 

[Ithekro]

Some say R2 speaks perfect Basic, he just swears like a sailor. All the time.

 

[Trekker4747]

If he speaks binary then he's got a very slow transmission rate and he's not exactly giving us enough bits to really form anything close to a sentence.

 

[Arrrrgggh]

Binary is the name of the language droids speak. They're not actually using what we consider binary; there's way more than just two sounds to it.

 

[Trekker4747]

Then it's poorly named considering the "bi" in "binary" means "two." But it's another case of Lucas (or someone else) affix a name/word to something without considering what that word actually means. I'll give him the latitude on the "whatever-many parsecs" thing with the notion that space-travel in SW's universe is more navigation that it is "point in a direction and go" and Han was able to navigate the MF a shorter distance than any other ship because of.... reasons.

But that droids speak "Binary", a language consisting for more than two sounds, is stupid.

 

[Ithekro]

They call what the Astromechs communicate with Droidspeak. Binary was for the even simpler load lifer droids that Owen Lars wanted to see if C-3PO to knew.

 

[Arrrrgggh]

They call what the Astromechs communicate with Droidspeak. Binary was for the even simpler load lifer droids that Owen Lars wanted to see if C-3PO to knew.

It's the same language.

 

[Kor]

It wouldn't be the first time that a word isn't used exactly according to its literal meaning. I mean, when was the last time that "quarantine" actually referred to a specific period of forty days?

But back to the question of R2 waking up in TFA (I thought this thread was about Chewbacca )

I read an article in which Abrams states that, when BB-8 took the blanket off of R2 and beeped at him, he was basically waking R2 and saying, "I have a piece of a map; do you have the rest?" That started up R2's bootup process, and because he had been on low-power mode for so long, it just took a while for him to become fully active and ready to display the rest of the map.

Kor

 

[{ Emilia }]

Yeah, that's the interview I was referring to here.

 

[bbjeg]

Remember when this thread was about Chewbacca?

 

[USS KG5]

So what was that scene between Rey and Leia about then? And Leia still wouldn't know how it happened.

Leia was mothering Rey I saw it as, shes bright enough to realise that the cycle is sort of repeating, and Rey is now the spunky young girl she was 35-odd years before.

She probably knows a bit more about her than she let on I suspect, especially as the film strongly implies, if she is Rey's aunt.

I'll have to see it again.

I feel exactly the same

 

[Trekker4747]

It wouldn't be the first time that a word isn't used exactly according to its literal meaning. I mean, when was the last time that "quarantine" actually referred to a specific period of forty days?

But back to the question of R2 waking up in TFA (I thought this thread was about Chewbacca )

I read an article in which Abrams states that, when BB-8 took the blanket off of R2 and beeped at him, he was basically waking R2 and saying, "I have a piece of a map; do you have the rest?" That started up R2's bootup process, and because he had been on low-power mode for so long, it just took a while for him to become fully active and ready to display the rest of the map.

Kor

Ah, so he's like those old computers we had in the early/mid-90s that ran Windows 3.x on a 486 processor. You knew once you turned on the computer you had time to go into the other room, make a cup of coffee and some toast, and maybe take a leak before coming back to the computer and it *might* finally be at the Desktop.

R2 has a long boot-up process is what I'm saying.

Well, that, and the aforementioned push updates requiring reboots that result in more updates needing reboots.