I don't know if I should resurrect this, but as someone who works with language on a daily basis on my job, I tend to get a little obsessive about things like this. I found a
very interesting PDF file of the September 1979 issue of Starlog. It's definitely worth a read, but there is a paragraph that mentions the origins of the term "big chap."
Quote:
Those working on the film called him "the big chap," or "the big fellow." The
nickname is not affectionate. The adult—as seen in the film—is huge and menacing and dark and loaded with teeth. Had the sets been more brightly lighted, though, audiences would have seen a tall, slender, half-lizard-half- man creature with a tusk-shaped, ex-truded skull and an almost equally long
tongue, a tongue that was equipped with a full set of vampirish teeth. And he has no eyes!
Quote:
Scott enjoyed the making of Alien, though, and names Kane's death as the scene that delighted him most. (John Hurt plays Kane.) The filmmakers call this "the kitchen scene" or "the scene with the chestburster"—in which the alien hatches out from within the rib cage of the dying Kane. (Their "pet" names for the various stages of the alien were: egg, face-hugger, chest-burster and the big chap.)
So as I had guessed, the term was applied by the people working on the film. It's not unusual for terms like these to become entrenched in Japan, while they fade away everywhere else. Maybe when the movie came out the Japanese media exclusively used that term to refer to the alien, and it just stuck. I don't know. The interesting thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, all of the references that I see in Japanese explaining the meaning of the English term say that it means "big chin." I expect that there was a misunderstanding or mistranslation somewhere along the way and it was never corrected. That happens a lot. Anyway, one mystery solved.
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