We’ve looked at lots of notoriously bad game translations into English over the years, so a common question I get is: Does Japan have famous bad game translation quotes too?
I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but I’ve listed a few bad English-to-Japanese game translation quotes that I’m familiar with.
Bad Translation #1: koin ikko ireru
This is probably one of the most famous and most widely known bad game translation quotes in Japan. It originates from the Japanese version of S.T.U.N. Runner, an old Atari arcade game that was developed in English first.
The actual phrase is コインいっこ いれる (koin ikko ireru) and is supposed to mean “Insert Coin”, one of the most common arcade game phrases of all time. Japanese players are already familiar with the English phrase (see why here), though, so it didn’t need to be translated at all, plus the fact that 95% of the rest of the game is entirely untranslated makes things weirder.
But most of all, the phrase koin ikko ireru is not how any normal Japanese person would ever say “Insert Coin” in this context. It’s not a grammatical disaster, and it’s obvious what it’s trying to say, but it comes off as so silly and wrong that it’s instantly memorable.
It’s difficult to explain in simple English how this Japanese phrase is wrong, but I feel it’s somewhat similar to our famous “A Winner is You!” line. In that sense, I might vaguely parallel it with a phrase like “It Enters the Coin”.
But just when you think koin ikko ireru on the title screen is memorable enough… it keeps showing up everywhere else in the game too!
As a result of all this, koin ikko ireru has become so memorable that it’s still fondly remembered and referenced today:
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There’ve been some coincidentally similar mistakes in other games too, including Hard Drivin’, the predecessor to S.T.U.N. Runner:
Bad Translation #2: zangyaku kōi teate
This is another notoriously bad translation that Japanese gamers like to poke fun at. It originates from Pit Fighter, an Atari fighting game from the early 1990s.
In the English version of the game, if you defeat an opponent badly enough, you’ll receive a message that says “Brutality Bonus” at the end of a stage. In Japanese, this was translated as 残虐行為手当 (zangyaku kōi teate).
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The thing is, it does roughly mean “brutality bonus” in the intended sense of getting extra money for being brutal, but it’s such a bizarre, over-the-top, and memorable phrase in Japanese that it’s akin to our famous ”You spoony bard!” line – it’s not “wrong”, but boy does it stand out.
As a bonus to sounding hilarious, the translation can also have somewhat different meanings depending on the context or how you parse the phrase, including “cruelty medical treatment” and “atrocious action benefits package”. And on top of all that, the same line was used in multiple versions of the game! This further solidified Pit Fighter’s reputation for having a hilariously bad translation.
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As you might expect, zangyaku kōi teate is still referenced to this day:
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(source, nothing obscene but maybe NSFW)
There are so many language issues in Pit Fighter, S.T.U.N. Runner, and other Atari games that a new word was born: アタリ語 (atari go, "Atari-isms").
Bad Translation #3: “Kill Them, They’re Russian”
This one’s a little different from the others. It’s not so much a popular bad translation as a notorious bad translation that got people upset. It’s from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, during a mission called “No Russian”.
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The idea of this mission is that you’re trying to make an attack on a Russian airport seem like it was perpetrated by Americans. So at the start of the mission, this guy says, “Remember, no Russian.” meaning, “Remember, don’t speak anything in Russian.”
The Japanese translators misunderstood this line as “no Russians”, so the text wound up saying, “Kill them. They’re Russian.” Even the Japanese voice actor says this incorrect line. Here’s a video of both versions:
I’m not really familiar with the Call of Duty series, so I’m not sure what this translation mistake results in. I’ve heard that this scene was already incredibly difficult and controversial around the world, so I imagine this mistranslation made matters worse. I do recall seeing a lot of frustration and Japanese articles about this mistake at the time, and I see it referenced frequently whenever the topic of bad game translation comes up on Japanese sites.
Bad Translation #4: Fallout 4
Fallout 4 has an incredible amount of text, and hours upon hours of audio dialogue. With so much stuff to be translated, a few mistakes here and there are understandably inevitable.
Unfortunately, one simple English phrase in Fallout 4 wound up with a hilariously strange translation in Japanese: “hell yeah!” was literally translated into 地獄だ！やぁ！ (jigoku da! yaa!), which means something like “This is hell! Yahh!” or “It is hell! Yahh!”.
This phrase is heard a lot during Raider battles, so this funny mistake has made Fallout 4’s jigoku da! yaa! one of the well-known examples of strange game translations in Japan.
Some paraphrased comments from Japanese gamers (mostly from here and on Twitter) that I’ve seen include:
They translated the shout properly in the previous games, so how did they get it wrong this time?
Surely the voice actor must’ve thought this was a strange thing to say.
The translator must not have known much slang.
In a way, it kind of nicely reflects how dumb the Raiders are.
[…]You can really feel how detailed and passionate they were with Witcher 3’s subtitle translation. Unlike a certain other… Err, never mind! Well, time to say goodbye… jigoku da! ya!
Supposedly there was a company that actually, literally translated “hell yeah” as “jigoku da! yaa!”
There are also plenty of misunderstandings and rationalizations when some Japanese gamers try to pick apart the translation:
The “ya” part of “hell ya!” is apparently a shortened version of “you”, so it probably means something like “go to hell”
First, “hell” is mostly an emphasizing slang word, much like like “heck”, “fuck”, or “freak”. It’s often translated in subtitles and dubs of Western movies as “kuso”.
As for “ya”, this is a contraction of “you” or “you are”. When Raiders are on alert, they say “The hell…?”, which is a shortened version of “What the hell is going on?”. They yell “Hell ya!” when they spot an enemy, so given the situation and the word choice, it’s probably a shortened version of “Here the hell you are!”, which the Gunner also uses. In short, the proper translation of “Hell ya!” is probably something along the lines of “There the hell you are!”.
Less literal translations like “ora!” or “yossha!” might seem better at first glance, but they’re completely devoid of the “rough and tough pack of hooligans” nuance of the “hell” phrase they shout, making these options clear mistranslations. They also lack that “post-apocalyptic” vibe and aren’t suited for Fallout.
Safer translations like “See you in hell!” or “Go to hell!” would be correct, but are really worn-out and hokey. In which case, i think “jigoku da, yaa!” is fine. It’s the most Raider-like choice.
I personally think it’s something like “ssha oraa!!”, like it’s a type of curse word for angering your opponent.
It doesn’t sound too strange if you interpret it more like “This is hell! Nice of you to come! We welcome you!!!”
Whenever a super-popular Japanese game gets translated and released in other regions, it’s common to see fans zoom in on single, simple language things, read too deeply into them and misinterpret them, and turn them into a bigger deal than they really are. As we can see from this example, this same exact phenomenon happens in Japan too.
Many More Translations
I’ve only covered a few examples here, but hopefully this article has given you an informative look into the Japanese world of bad game translation. There are certainly many more examples out there that deserve a spot on this list, so if you know of any infamous bad translations into Japanese, let me know and I’ll update this page from time to time.
Also, if you speak a different language, what bad translation quotes are famous where you’re from? I bet every culture has its own “All Your Base” stuff that the rest of the world would love to learn about!
I hate to be pedantic, but your summary of the Modern Warfare 2 section is slightly inaccurate. The intent of the phrase “no Russian” and the mission as a whole is that the attack on the airport is meant to look like an American attack. Your summary works, but misses a slightly important bit of context for the mission. And yes, the mission was quite controversial at the time, since it allows for the killing of civilians, but this led to one other change in localization the Japanese took poorly.
In the original version of the game, there is no penalty (although also no requirement) for killing civilians during the mission. In the Japanese release, shooting a civilian resets you to the last checkpoint, giving you a “Friendly fire will not be tolerated” message. As a result, for the first half of the level there’s nothing you can do except shoot at the lights or slowly walk through.
Thanks! I’ll fix the description – like I mentioned, I’m not very familiar with the series and was pretty sure someone would call me out for some wrong details, haha.
Yeah, that chance in the mission is one of the reasons why the mistranslation is so stupid because it’s like
Guy: Kill the Russians
You: Kills Russians
Game: GAME OVER WTF don’t kill those Russians
also the guy telling you this is russian…
I don’t know if there’s a lot of famous mistranslations for French gamers (maybe Final Fantasy VII, but I haven’t played it in French all that much), but there’s three particular instances that comes to mind immediately for me.
The first two are both from the Metal Gear Solid series. In MGS 2, during a codec call, Raiden answers “Copy that.” I don’t know how it’s possible but the translator apparently didn’t know it simply means “Understood”, so the phrase was translated into “Duplique ça”. Which *literally* means “copy that”, as in “duplicate this object”. It makes absolutely no sense in context but it’s pretty hilarious.
The second one is from MGS 4. It’s been a while so I don’t exactly remember the context, but at some point Otacon says something like “What’s the hold-up?” to Snake. In French we do use the world “hold-up”, but only to reference holding someone at gunpoint in a robbery or something. The translator is apparently only familiar with that sense, so the translated line is something like “Qu’est-ce que ce braquage ?”, which makes no sense because you’re smack in the middle of a forest with absolutely no one around you, especially not someone holding a gun to your face asking for money.
Actually, now that I think about it, the MGS series is well known for being pretty bizarrely translated. MGS 1 actually has a French dub which is considered super cheesy, but a lot of people (myself included) still enjoy it for its nostalgia value.
Anyways, the last one is something I remember well because I probably laughed for five minutes straight when I figured it out. Grim Fandango has an excellent French translation, including a very good dub that I would argue is equal to the original. However, for the Remastered version that came out a few years ago, Double Fine kept the original French translation but couldn’t be bothered to hire a translator to translate the new menus, so they just used Google Translate.
It’s fine for most of the options, but there’s a “Resolution” option that allows you to pick “Indigène” (“Indigenous”) as one of the available options. I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw that, because it makes zero sense. What the hell is an indigenous resolution?
In the end I switched the game to English to try and figure it out. Turns out the option in English is labeled as “Native”, as in “Use the native resolution of the game”. Yeah, “native” can be translated into “indigène”, but only when you’re talking about someone’s birthplace. Ironically if they had left it in English, it would have been easier to understand since the word is the same in French.
Oh, yes. Final Fantasy 7’s translation — rough though it was in English — reaches legendary proportions in French. You really ought to check it out if only for comedy value.
If I recall, that’s a telephone game issue. The other western releases are translated from the already-wrecked english translation, so they inherit all its issues AND THEN add their own on top of it.
Apparently, the spanish version consistently calls your (adventuring) party a “fiesta”. Which is hilarious to me.
Not only that, sometimes it calls it a “partido” which is a POLITICAL party.
One of my dreams is making an in-depth analysis and comparison of FFVII’s Spanish translation, because good god is it hilariously atrocious. I honestly don’t know how people could play the game from start to finish and understand the plot, you would get better results with Google Translate.
You definitely should; I’d love to read that!
I’m a huge fan of JRPGs, planning on getting FFVII, and I speak Spanish.. actually “partido” is the same word used for sports matches. LOL when I get FFVII I’ll set it to Spanish and see how things go. I guess I’ll keep you posted!
I’m a huge fan of JRPGs, planning on getting FFVII, and I speak Spanish.. actually “partido” is the same word used for sports matches. LOL when I get FFVII I’ll set it to Spanish and see how things go. I guess I’ll keep you posted!
Speaking of MGS4 in French, the English version has Pieuvre Armement’s slogan “Les tentacules de la pieuvre pour votre guerre!”, which in game is given an English translation of “Arms of the octopus, arms for your war!”. No idea how accurate that is, but the pun is exclusive to English despite them being a French company and the translation being official. How was that done in the French translation?
*not being official in the context of the game
The MGS1 is definitely unique in that it was actually VOICED in languages other than English and Japanese, yes? That’s quite rare when it comes to Japanese titles indeed. On the plus side, they even ‘translated’ the Cyborg Ninja chant by having each of the voice actors. Now that’s attention to detail for something you wouldn’t pay much attention to.
…I thought that only dubbing games into English and Japanese was a modern thing, but now that you mention it, the only Japanese game I can think of with extensive voice acting and lots of dubs is Breath of the Wild.
And it’s a Nintendo game at that whose ‘voice acting’ if you can call it that are pretty much limited to grunts and the like for most of their titles. They clearly went above and beyond there…
Breath Of The Wild has quite a lot of voice acting. While Link himself doesn’t talk, almost all other major characters are voiced. Zelda in particular has an extensive amount of voice lines.
I love that the first two examples are both from Atari Games arcade titles.
Me too. I also love that in STUN Runner, it appears to be the ONLY text they translated. Why even bother at that point when the only words you’re translating are words the audience already knows?
And even if they didn’t know… it isn’t exactly HARD to figure out that flashing words on an arcade screen always mean either “game over” or “insert coin”.
In Spanish, the Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow translation is known for having its fair share of mistakes or odd choices, like Counter (a move that counterattacks) as Contador (someone who counts), Wrap (a move that wraps vines or tentacles around your enemy) as Repetición (repetition), or the most famous one, Slam (just a slam) as Portazo (specifically a door slam). While from Gen II onwards the translation team got better, the mistranslations from Gen I stuck all the way until Gen VI
Another memorably bad translation is Final Fantasy VII, having plenty of typos from someone clearly typing too fast, and mistranslations, like Party being translated both as Political Party and as the social gathering kind of Party
I know that Counter was corrected in the anime, and a lot of move names were corrected in X and Y. Was Contador corrected in X and Y?
I didn’t read the part about Gen 6 the first time, and my reply was badly-worded, wow.
Yep, from gen 6 onwards it’s now “Contraataque”, which means “counterattack”, because spanish always uses the full word for it. Though looking at it, “Contraataque” exceeds the ten letter limit they had for names in gens 1-5, so maybe that’s why it was mistranslated (and took so long to fix) to begin with.
Gen 6 is when they changed a lot of move names in all languages. Most of the English changes were just formatting changes (ie “ThunderPunch” to “Thunder Punch”), but they also FINALLY corrected “Faint Attack” to “Feint Attack”.
Granted, that one probably wasn’t a mistranslation as much as it had been correctly translated by the translator, then had some ignorant editor come in afterwards and “correcting” the “typo” in the name.
In French, they chanegd the name of the moves to avoid confusion.
Glare was first tanslated as “Intimidation”, which isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s not a direct translation, but it reflects the idea of the move pretty well. But Gen 3 added the ability “Intimidate”, which also became “Intimidation”.
So in Gen 6, it became “Regard Médusant” (something like “Stunning Gaze”.)
“Night Shade” was in the same case. It was first translated as “Ténèbres” (“Darkness” pretty much). But that sounds really close to the Dark Type (“Ténèbre”)
It became “Ombre Nocturne” (litterally “Night Shade”) in gen 6.
There’s also some phonetic writing to reduce the space, but they are mostly accepted and weren’t changed later. (Notably Water (“eau”) is written with a single “O”.
The notable translations (not bad, but really weird, and that warrants lots of discussion) are more about the Pokémon naming.
Grimer and Muk are translated as Tadmorv and Grotadmorv (Literrally “Pile of Snot” and Big Pile of Snot written in phonetiics) and Farfetch’d is “Canarticho” (Duck + Artichoke) despite it clearly holding a leek.
I would like to note the weird habit spanish translations have of being based on both the english and the japanese version, like Gym Leaders having their names translated as puns on their types from gens 2-4 (1 used the english names and 5 went with the flower theme Gym Leaders have in Japan, despite stuff like the PWT using the punny names from previous generations, don’t know about gen 6 onwards). Then some moves and abilities (and the Dark-Type) being closer to japanese (it’s Siniestro in spanish, which clearly comes from the original “あく”), but sometimes to english, and some other times they just make up a new name (which isn’t bad, a few moves have really cool names; Blast Burn is “Igneous Ring” over here). All of this while using the english names for every single Pokémon. Someone should look into this, really.
All of them except Type Null/Código Cero anyways.
All international translations of Pokemon games have been done from Japanese starting with I believe Black/White. Prior to that, the French, German, Spanish and Italian translations were crosstranslated from English.
I know this is an old comment, but Did You Know Gaming did a video about Gen 1’s localisation, and they said that Red and Blue were the first Nintendo games translated into Italian. The whole translation was done by two people who were given a list of move names out-of-context, and they decided not to change the Pokémon species names because they thought it wasn’t worth it. The same probably applies to Spanish as well, though I know that Ocarina of Time was “translated” the year before.
Out of curiosity as a very poor Japanese speaker, how would you phrase “please insert coin”? I don’t see anything wrong except that I think 枚 is used for coins and maybe it missing a ください on the end.
I would write it as “koin o ireyo,” but I’m an ancient samurai, so I’m allowed.
I’m also a pretty poor Japanese reader, but I’ve been wondering the same thing, about this and about a similar comment on the last post.
In this case, I think part of the problem is that 入れる is the plain form of the verb, so the phrase is more like a factual description of what’s being done to the coin, rather than an instruction to do something with it. “You’re inserting a coin,” perhaps.
You’re correct that a fairly standard way of making it an instruction or request in polite Japanese would be to make it 入れて下さい, but then it reads more as “Please insert a coin,” which at least in English would come across as unnecessarily polite and wordy and would probably also seem awkward on a game’s title screen.
Now, the last post includes a screenshot of another game that instead uses the imperative form to write “PUSH START” as スタートを押せ, which the subtitle explains is a really pushy way of commanding someone to do something. So that verb form isn’t great for this purpose either.
So I’m not sure what else that leaves as a good native Japanese equivalent of “PUSH START” or “INSERT COIN.” There’s probably some clever colloquial way of phrasing it that they just don’t teach you in basic Japanese lessons, though.
From what I can tell it’s almost always been “Insert Coin” even since the 1970s. There are variations but they’re in English too, like “Deposit Coin” or “1 Coin = 1 Credit”. It’s actually hard to find any examples of it written in Japanese, even in the most insanely Japanese culture-heavy arcade games it’s always just “Insert Coin” everywhere I look. But I imagine it’d be something like コインを入れてください or a variation of it.
If anyone out there knows of any Japanese arcade games that don’t use English for “Insert Coin” let me know!
Here are a couple. Neither is quite straightforward, but yeah, pretty much that.
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=510
Kosodate Quiz My Angel 1&2: コインを入れてね
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=733
PT Reach Mahjong: コイン マタハ メタルヲ イレテ クダサイ
THE most infamous translation flub in Norwegian is the “word” Sminkesex, literally “Cosmetics sex”, a result of someone encountering the phrase “make-up sex” and misinterpreting it in a hilariously creative way. It’s actually appeared in subtitles for multiple movies and TV shows (I’ve seen it in person in the subtitles for an episode of Friends), but these days it’s so well known and has appeared in so many parodies and comedy skits about language and translation it’s unlikely we’ll ever see anyone making this error again.
Another nearly as famous one is from Pulp Fuction, where the line “It’s not a motorcycle, baby, it’s a chopper” got bungled into “It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a helicopter” by someone I hope was just translating off the script.
And, while this one isn’t really famous, and I’ve never seen anyone mention it before, there’s a rather amusing flub in the subtitles for the second season of 24, where Marshall Goren was referred to as “Police Chief Goren” in the subtitles for the first few episodes until the translator finally realized Marshall is an actual name and that the guy being charged for, quoting the 24 wikia, “eight counts of kidnapping a minor, two counts of child pornography, and first degree murder” probably isn’t a US marshal.
Who knows? Maybe the US government has lowered the standards in order to be a marshal, so even nasty criminals can join the ranks.
Way to create false US stereotypes, 24’s norwegian translator.
I remember an episode of MacGyver translated Deep-fried into Dypfryst (Frozen solid)…
In one pirated russian translation of Startcraft, Overmind was translated as “Nadmozg” – that is, “above-brain”. It’s got so memetic that it became a slang term for bad translators.
On a less videogame-related note, one fansub for Death Note translated “God pisses me off” as “Piss on me, God”
I find ‘Totally studly!’ silly enough. (Maybe that’s an age-related and/or geographical thing though.)
Recently i have been playing Zone of The Enders HD Collection and i have been noticing some really bad translations mistakes in portuguese. Mostly the text is translated literally (and it change the meaning of certain phrases), one phrase in the ‘st game suddenly change to spanish at one point, but the most remarkable error is a “text temporary” text in one of the cutscenes of the 1st game. Luckly, the game is enjoyable even with that.
(Sorry for my english)
What Dragon Quest game was that screenshot from? I’ve been playing through the series over the last year, and currently up to VII. Even though i’m still a bit new to the series, i’ve quickly become fascinated with it and am super curious if that screen came from one of the later games i haven’t gotten to yet, or from one of the bajillion spin-off titles.
Given that the phrasing mentions “a Dragon Quest player,” I’m compelled to assume it’s from DQ10 — the only series entry to be an MMO, and thus the only one that allows for player text entry.
I also don’t recognize it, and I’ve played every other entry in the series. 🙂
Oh, I guess that makes since.
It sucks that that’s the only numbered entry that hasn’t gotten a US release yet, but then, I don’t really like MMOs, so i’d likely have still skipped it anyway.
I expect I’d have tried it out, since I’m a huge Dragon Quest fan, but, yeah, my MMO days are mainly behind me.
Yeah, it’s 10, which is oddly enough the one DQ game I’ve spent the most time playing. Although it was only so I could get 3DS screenshots for my Funky Fantasy IV book 😛
Lots of examples from Danish subtitles …
Subtitling is quite a prestigious task around these parts, since almost every international program that goes on TV is aired with subtitles, save for children’s shows and movies. However, many channels financed through commercials outsource subtitling duties to some extremely low-budget companies that set inhumanely tight deadlines for their translators (kinda like official anime subtitles these days ^_~ That’s another can of worms entirely, though). Keep in mind that Danish subtitles have very strict guidelines associated with them. Combine that with the afore-mentioned deadlines and translators that, occasionally, aren’t entirely qualified, and you get stuff like “orcs” — the fantasy creature — being misheard as “orcas”, turning dialogue that was supposed to warn the main character about the orcs and goblins in the forest into dialogue warning the main character of the rather out-of-place killer whales in a forest full of goblins. In the same vein, one translator didn’t know the word “newfangled” and assumed it meant “to get new fangs”, and another misheard “Navy Seal” as “baby seal” or “Hannibal Lecter” as “Hannah Balecter”, whoever that is xD The list goes on and on, and these mistakes have come to be known as “bøffer” — a Danish slang term that literally means “steaks” and is equivalent to the English “screw-ups” :3 If you know Danish and like this kind of stuff, I highly recommend you visit “Bøfsiden” at http://titlevision.dk/boeuf.htm — a treasure trove of “bøffer” :3 Unfortunately, the site isn’t updated anymore so the examples cited there are pretty old.
I don’t remember any famous game examples, but I do recall a particularly amusing mistranslation in a game from my childhood. The game in question was Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers, a Disney game. These were among the few games to get Danish translations at the time, and you would expect Disney to get some people suited for the job, but nope! This game had a flub that made me so confused back in the day that I had no idea what was actually being said until I learned English. In a tutorial, you’re told that you need to collect a piece of a device that will transport you to the boss of that world in each level you complete. This device was called the Boss Warp Pad in English, but the Danish translator misinterpreted this as “a boss named Warp Pad”. This resulted in the tutorial telling me to “gather pieces of the boss named Warp Pad, which will be beaten if you complete all four levels. That will grant you access to the BIG boss!” (The word “beat” here was originally “ordne”, which can mean both “to fix” and “to win against”) xD I was so confused as to who this Warp Pad person was AND who the “big boss” was (that was just the boss of that world xD)
Now I’m just imagining something where someone warns someone entering a forest about the Orcas, and…
“You mean Orcs.”
“No”
*Countless knife-wielding killer whales poke out of the foliage.*
Interesting article. It’s hard to understand why the Japanese find those particular lines so funny without knowing Japanese, I wonder if they feel the same confusion with our “All your base” and “son of a submariner/spoony bard” famous lines and why we find them funny.
That’s actually a common comment I see: “Why is ‘all your base are belong to us’ wrong and apparently funny?”
I also often see people try to explain why it’s wrong, but the explanations aren’t quite right either. Explaining how language works is hard, but explaining how wrong language works is much harder in my experience 😯
Not a native speaker, but let me take a shot at explaining why someone might find those lines to be kinda hilarious.
1. Literally, a reader will interpret the line to mean “You will insert a coin,” like the game is a fortune teller telling you about something that’s about to happen in the near future or a hypnotist trying to get you to do something (“You are getting very sleepy… You will insert a coin…”)
2. The word for bonus they chose (teate) is very corporate. Think words like “medical benefits,” “housing allowance,” “year end bonus,” and the like. So when used within the context of a “brutal act bonus,” it might conjure up images of someone reading through their very boring employment contract and going down the list like, “Medical benefits? Yup, that’s there. Relocation allowance? Yup. Per diem is good. And the brutal act bonus. Yeah, everything checks out.”
For #1, your reading is incorrect. The “commanding” forms would be 入れ 入れろ 入れよう, least to most polite. 入れる which is plain form just looks like an incomplete sentence.
But there is something like that in a Japanese game. Tsukihime has a line あなたは犯人です (you are the villain) which was typo’d to あなたを犯人です… which is not really grammatical but sounds like “you’ll be made into the villain”. So the joke is the speaker is hypnotizing you.
*more to less direct, none of them are polite
I actually think you might be misinterpreting the person you’re responding to here.
They’re not saying that 入れる is a command, they’re saying “You will insert a coin” in the same sense as “Jim will insert a coin.”
Saying “Jim will insert a coin” doesn’t mean you’re *commanding* Jim to insert a coin, but it does imply that you know he will insert a coin in the future, as if you’re some sort of fortuneteller.
As far as I know, this reading would be valid for the original Japanese, where there is no distinction between present and future tense. “You insert a coin” would be another possibility, and similar things along those lines.
Of course, it can be confusing to explain this distinction in English, where the imperative form of a verb *is* the plain form.
Late to the party, but I’ve got some Icelandic stories!
In the new God of War, there’s a boss called Dauði Kaupmaður, explained in-game to mean “Death Merchant”. I cracked up when I happened to look up at my husband fighting this boss, because “Dauði kaupmaður” does not, in fact, mean what you’d mean by “Death Merchant” in English. It’s another one of those things that are slightly difficult to explain, but basically, the way you’d actually parse that in Icelandic is “Death the merchant”, as in a merchant named Death. It’s the same format used for the Icelandic name of, for instance, Bob the Builder. To boot, “kaupmaður” does mean merchant, but the image it’s going to bring into your head is more like the manager of a small neighborhood grocery store. All in all, I’ve been going around telling all my friends about this.
Video games never actually get translated into Icelandic, so most other examples of bad translations into Icelandic come from movie subtitles, where they’re the sort involving a native Icelander not understanding the words being used. Examples include:
How would you translate “Merchant of Death”?
To just correct the grammar, you’d want either “dauðakaupmaður” or “kaupmaður dauðans” (the former implying a merchant who deals in death, the latter a merchant operating on behalf of death). However, both sound kind of silly. A somewhat smoother-sounding translation I thought of was “Nákaupmaðurinn” (the corpse merchant), but someone giving it careful thought could probably come up with something better.
Some Swedish ones I can think of, no idea about notoriety, but here goes.
In the subtitles of one of the Lethal Weapon moves, the phrase “Internal Affairs”, as in those who investigate the police themselves, internally, was translated as “Inferno Affären”, as in the translator misinterpreted the word internal as inferno. This wouldn’t necessarily even be an incorrect phrase, assuming it regarded some kind of investigation of something named, or nicknamed, Inferno (a word which means the same thing in Swedish), but comes across as very goofy and out of place.
One episode of The Simpsons had the words “deep-fry” somehow become “djupfrysa”, as in to put something in a freezer until frozen solid.
A particularly quaint example was that in the 80’s, someone decided that they would try to localize Hokuto No Ken, or Fist Of The North Star, into Swedish, at a time of stricter censorship, the result feeling like they were intending to pass off a VERY violent seinen anime as a children’s cartoon.
Using the English translation as a starting point, which at that time very peculiarly titled it “Bearfist Ken”, or something along those lines, coming out as “Ken, Björnnäven”, meaning the same thing, and being as awkward.
You have narration which is supposed to be describing two celestial bodies, somehow turning out into the sentence “I universum finns två planeter.” meaning “There are two planets in the universe.”, presented as if they were saying there were literally only two.
The hero Ken, describing his famously gory martial arts, says “Shinken har inga fiender.”, the translator COMPLETELY failing to understand the phrase “Has no equals” to mean “Has no enemies”, with Ken thus saying his martial art having no enemies, making zero sense in Swedish.
The famous “Omaeu Wa Mou, Shindeiru.”, “You are already dead.” becomes “Du är redan död.”, correct, but delivered in a VERY peculiar and informal manner, the word “är” reduced to basically the letter E, pronounced as a short “eeh”, and the last d in “Död” ommitted, sounding very informal and ill fitting for the character (the voice the actor was putting on, being very ill fitting and sounding more like something fit for children’s cartoons).
You wouldn’t deliver it like this to someone you just fought to the death, it sounds more like something you’d say casually, in an almost upbeat manner, to someone you beat in a videogame.
Of course, since this was also censored, as Swedish media at the time interpreting anything animated as only for children and youth, ever, the famously graphical shots of heads and other bodyparts rupturing violently and viscerally, are fully censored and cut out, frames edited to make the characters in question just limply and anti-climatically fall over, with no blood, not even using the less visually graphic silhoutted monochrome shots.
To nobody’s surprise, Fist Of The North Star with all the graphic violence edited out, and with a very awkward and unfitting dub, didn’t garner any market interest, and they only released one VHS tape with three episodes.
If you want to see how out of place a lot of the voice acting is, or how censored it was, you can find clips of it on YouTube, search for “Ken Björnnäven”, or plain “Fist Of The North Star Swedish”
In Russian-speaking countries, many older games had unlicensed machine translation, which resulted in a whole bunch of weird stuff (that I wish I had time to gather and research) but the most memetic one is probably how “Wasted” from GTA San Andreas became “Потрачено” (Potracheno) – which sort of means “spent” as in, money. Not only was it completely unrelated to the event it was tied to, it also has an unusual for it grammatical form (passive voice and neutral grammatical gender), so it really stood out. In Russian-speaking gaming (and not only) circles it’s been serving the same semantic function as “F/Press F to pay respects”
My personal favorite though is the one from Sonic Adventure 2 copy that I had, where “I’m Shadow the Hedgehog, the ultimate life form” became “I’m shadow of the poorcupine, the only life from there”. Or how Rouge the Bat became “blushing bludgeon” in the same translation. Those are not as famous but they’re dear to my heart.
Okay, now I have a mental image of an ancient samurai (or at least, how media portrays them) walking up to a Hard Drivin’ arcade cabinet, examining this strange sight, and, deciding to obey the magically-displayed directive, pulls out one unit of era-appropriate (for him) currency, and hunts down some place to insert it. Finding a slot that seems right — and, by chance, it is — he puts it in, only for it to come back out, not effecting any change in the lights. Perhaps he has no idea that anything was supposed to happen, so he does the cultural equivalent of shrugging your shoulders, collects his coin, and walks away.
While my native tongue is syrian arabic,i am fluent in english and mostly watch everything with english subs. Add that to the fact that no games were translated to arabic until very recently and you can see why i cant give specific infamous cases here. however,i can talk about a few issues in arabic subs/dubs in general, as well as a few things that personally irk me:
1-Dialects: the “arabic speaking world” has tons of different dialects,and those dialects are VERY different from each other,to the degree that people from some countries cant at all understand what people from other countries are saying,such as Syrians and Libyans for example. there is something called “official arabic”,which is taught in schools across all the arabic speaking world. you might think using that would be the best solution,but the issue is that NO ONE uses that style,or anything close to it, in day to day life,so while hearing it is understandable to all it will break all immersion in the game. movies are almost always done that way. When you look at games being dubbed,some went that way,while some chose a relatively dominant dialect (either Egyptian or Syrian,mostly)and went with it,which led to people from that area being happy and people from the other areas being pissed off.
2-Removing Curse Words: for some reason the arabic translators,whether official or even fan translations, remove curse words even from R rated movies. the most infamous,and extremely common,example of that is of always changing “Fuck” into “Tabban”,which basically means “Damn” >_>. the same thing goes for removing pretty much all relatively adult anime content in a dub,or censoring stuff. i remember buying a pirated code geass dvd with arabic subs when i first started watching anime, and all scenes of women in bikinis had a black square over the woman,or the entire scene being black.
3- Adding Unwanted Commentary: This one is exclusive to fan subs,mostly anime. for some reason,subbers like to insert their own bloody opinions and beliefs as commentary above the line that they want to comment on. this can happen multiple times per episode even. the most recent example i saw is a line saying “god will forgive me for killing you” and mr.translator added above “ofcourse that is wrong” >_>. i recently spoke with one of these guys and he said they do it “so the children dont get influenced by the bad things in the anime” even though that wasnt a kids anime >_>. this can even extend to intentionally mistranslating stuff,such as buddha prayers being changed to islamic prayers.
so yeah,you can see why i decided to watch english subs instead >_>.
There the hell you are!
Famous bad translations in Italian? Let me think…
-First, let’s pull out the most famous one: remember the Futurama episode when Bender turned into a werecar? Well, the Italian translator didn’t get that the “Were” in “Werecar” had the same meaning as in “Werewolf” and interpreted it as the past tense of “to be”, so it became “Auto-che-era”, or in English “Car-that-was”.
-This one still persists nowadays. In Dragon Ball, when Piccolo first partecipates at the Tenkaichi Tournament he uses the false name “Ma Junior”. Whoever translated the dialogue in the anime didn’t get it was a fake name, so even nowadays in Dragon Ball Super the dub still refers to Piccolo as “Junior” (pronounced “You-nior” to add more salt to the wound)
Don’t know other well known ones, but I should add one that always cracked me: the Italian translation of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, where every instance of a name in English was for some reason romanized as it was a Japanese word creating situations like dinosaurs being costantly referred as “dynausors” or “dinosors”, or when a character summons a giant sea monster called “Ribaia-san”.
That Fallout 4 discourse attempting to explain why a bad, overly literal translation is actually _not_ bad and fits the nature of the characters more than the original writer’s intended meaning is hilarious… and sadly familiar. (I probably only need to say “Setzer” and half of you will instantly know what I’m talking about.)
The more I learn about Japanese nerd culture, the more it seems like a direct mirror of American/European nerd culture. It’s almost eerie.
Some Brazilian blunders off the top of my head:
-In Phantasy Star (1, I believe), the translator seems to have confused the meaning of the word “affair” in the line “Do not sniff around Lassic’s affairs”. The Brazilian Portuguese translation reads something akin to “Do not make speculations about Lassic’s love life!”, and I believe it’s the most popular video game mistranslation in Brazil.
-I never played it, but apparently the translation of Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 4 is pretty bad, but mostly in the sense of being pretty stiff overall. That being said, apparently the game mistranslates the word “boss” as “patrão”, which does mean “boss”… as in, in a workplace, like a company or something.
-This one isn’t very famous, but left me in stitches when I saw it. There’s this dog NPC in Tales of Berseria, right? When you talk to it, it goes “*whiiiiiiiine*”. The translator seems to have missed the “h”, because this previously regular dog suddenly becomes a TALKING ALCOHOLIC dog, as it demands “Wine!!!!”. *Italian chef kiss*
I’m always really happy when it turns out that fans in other countries do the exact same shit fans here do. It’s a comforting reminder that no matter where a fan comes from, we have things in common. (even if those things are dumb as hell)
In every time and every place, the deeds of nerds remain the same.
Always nice to see another LoGH fan.
“Whenever a super-popular Japanese game gets translated and released in other regions, it’s common to see fans zoom in on single, simple language things, read too deeply into them and misinterpret them, and turn them into a bigger deal than they really are. As we can see from this example, this same exact phenomenon happens in Japan too.”
Hmm… no offense, but isn’t zooming in on isolated “language things” in JP>EN translations, reading deeply into them and then turning the interpretations into wholesale generalizations kinda sorta the bulk of the content here?
…that was his point. “This happens when games are translated from Japanese to English. As we can see, it also happens when games are translated from English to Japanese”. He’s pointing out that even though most readers have probably only seen it happen when games get translated from Japanese to English, it’s a fairly universal thing that happens with other language pairs as well.
Reading through this reminds me of my first year of French, which I took in middle school. I had to stay late one day, and I was even more tired than usual. When my teacher asked me to write on the whiteboard what I planned to do over the weekend, I overthought the phrasing for “I’m gonna sleep”. The resultant mangled French has become somewhat of a catchphrase for me. It is as follows: Je vais faire du dormir. In English, that sentence means “I am going to do some to sleep”, or something to that effect. The rest of that session was useless, as I then asked how to say “throw the egg on the floor” or something similar, and was subsequently so amused I couldn’t stand because I was laughing too hard. Man, those were good times.
Speaking of Russians, Pathologic’s 2005 Russian to English translation is a fantastic and underrated bad translation, at least 60% because of the really weird voice acting. Most famous are the inexplicable mispronunciation of ‘panacea’ and an invented word being translated inexplicably as ‘onion’, but ‘So keep polyhedron’ and ‘behave yourselves humanly’ are some of my favorites.
A friend of mine told me about the troubled translation of Neverwinter Nights into Chinese, leading to an anecdote about a woman kicking someone in the teeth being translated as a proper name, Grandma Kickteeth. Worse, because of an error in the translation database, by sheer luck, a lot of unrelated lines were overwritten with a sort of exception-overflow line… about Grandma Kickteeth.
The crowning acheivement of this random bug was that sometimes, if Grandma Kickteeth showed up in the middle of a plot-important dialogue branch, it would cause the dialogue tree to have no offramps – softlocking the game.
To this day, I’m told, Chinese gamers blame game-ending bugs on Grandma Kickteeth, kicking the game right in the teeth.
at least atari japan translation is beloved, zenimax asia translation? sometimes meh