I don't understand why there is even this compulsion to explain everything. This isn't even Star Trek with its pretension of being more scientifically minded.
And that is a good thing, because despite its reputation, Star Wars wasn't created for the extreme scifi geek who actually knows these things, but for a general audience that needs recognizable imagery to relate to the events on screen (and if the scifi geek is honest, he does as well). People are used to naval ship to ship combat and WW1 dogfights, therefore capital ships and fighters follow these templates.People who make scifi imagery have never learned that the concept of "form follows function" actually tends to work with scifi geeks. So they waste everyone's time just trying to make things that look cool. When they aren't making things try to seem both cool and familiar by grafting on things just because the ignorant public would find it more recognizable. So you have star destroyers with large superstructures and bridges well above the "deck" because, well, because that's the way some people expect to see ships look.
"Realistic" space battles would likely involve ships too far away from each other to ever fit on the same screen (or even visually see each other), and certainly no manned fighters whatsoever. Nobody would want to watch that.
But that's the ex post explanation. I doubt the people who designed the models for ANH had that in mind.
Are you sure it's because of bad English, and not just because it doesn't convey the meaning of the Japanese sentence correctly?
