It's always flattering for a publication to see its musings translated into a foreign tongue, so it was with great delight that we recently spotted part of a ground-breaking Reg report in Romanian.

Yup, our fearless exposé of the Romanian Jedi Academy has provoked a certain amount of comment among the members of that august establishment.

Delighted that the initiative has caught the eye of El Reg, one proto Luke Skywalker takes the following magnificent piece of journalism:

Count Dracula had better watch his back - the Romanians have opened a Jedi Academy and it can only be a matter of time before graduates are working their way through Transylvania at weekends, smiting the undead with their light sabres, between bouts of trading collectibles and arguing as to whether The Phantom Menace was merely the worst Star Wars film or actually the worst film ever made.

...and offers part of it as:

E numai o chestiune de timp pina cind absolventii Academiei Jedi vor haladui la sfarsit de saptamana printre gunoaie si resturi, stirnindu-i pe ne-morti cu sabiile-de-lumina si certindu-se intre ei daca Amenintarea Fantomei este cel mai slab film al seriei sau cel mai slab film facut vreodata.

Top stuff. Sadly, though, the disussion of our coverage then turns to the small matter of the Dracula reference, roundly condemned as a piece of ethnic stereotyping which maintains that Romanians spend all of their spare time decapitating corpses and bedecking their humble cottages with garlic flowers.

At least, that's what we think they're saying. Readers who have studied Romance languages other than Romanian will be able to see from the above that there are tantalising similarities between the language and, say, Spanish. The Slavic influence is evident, though - notably on the vocabulary*.

Bearing that in mind, we're pretty certain that some Romanian Jedi would like us to set the record straight regarding Romania, viz; that it is a highly-developed eastern European democracy with TV and electricity and everything and that the locals are not a superstition-struck bunch of yokels who cower in fear of the night. And we're happy to do so, and further recommend Romania as an ideal short weekend break location for sophisticated metropolitans - apart, that is, from the eastern village of Cristinesti where locals recently mistook disco lights in a nearby town for an alien invasion and fled for the hills. ®

Bootnote

*According to this reference, Romanian has "77% lexical similarity with Italian, 75% with French, 74% with Sardinian, 73% with Catalan, 72% with Portuguese and Rheto-Romance, 71% with Spanish."

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