It seems there are two parts to this game: the main “Aincrad” stuff and the “Hollow Area” side. I decided to finally go explore the Hollow Area aspect of the game, which is quite different and challenging. Later, when I returned to the main town, a bunch of badly translated cut scenes awaited me.
Note that there’s potentially some NSFW stuff below.
Watch out for the Bad Trantula!
"So, what do you do with this Ores?"
Even if you don't know what's going on in the game, you can probably tell that a "to" is missing here
The Japanese word michi can mean things like path, road, street, avenue, etc. but many of the translators for this game don't really know the nuance differences in English. Also, this particular mission was confusing - I thought I had to defeat a boss named Goblin Thief, but nope, you just gotta kill a ton of generic Goblin Thieves on a grassy, barely-visible path
The Japanese word hayai can mean "soon" or "early" or "quickly", but many of the game's translators didn't really care about their English usages. And from what I've seen from other messages like this, the e-mail titles and the e-mail contents seem to have been translated by different people too. Please come back soo, good translators
"Morgue Blocking Dark Domain"
I love all the place names in this game
Japanese entertainment uses the word karakuri a lot, but we don't have a universally good, single equivalent in English. So it's pretty common for translators to fall back on "gimmick" as the default "good enough" choice
"Did you removed it?"
"Even if it cute" - Also it's obvious in this scene that Kirito is talking about Philia, the girl in this screenshot. But it seems the translator had no context here and had no idea who/what Kirito was talking about, so to be safe, the translator went with "it" as the pronoun everywhere
"Sorry Philia in calling you out." - I'm not even sure what the original line was, but my hunch is it's more like "Sorry for bringing you all the way out here like this."
The typos in this game break grammar in ways I've never considered before
Weird grammar + "chef" is misspelled as "chief"
"Don't say cheap stuffs."
"Can you go get the drink to goes well with the mean"
"So me and Sinon with make up the table!"
We really need a name for this type of English translation
"Dam"
"Attack hurts, be alert!"
This is more amusing than wrong, but I wanted to share it anyway
I dunno, maybe "weak bean sprout" is common in other varieties of English than my own, but I enjoy this insult quite a lot
This problem isn't the translators' fault - it falls squarely on the programmers and/or translation manager
"If this was rea-life kendo, we would already have winner!"
"They've really become bigger, didn't they?"
"I didn't thought you would be this good"
At some point we started keeping a penetration count during the stream, but I forget where it stood at this point in the game
That whole scene with Leafa just now WAS pretty shcoking
I don't know what that last sentence is trying to say
Here's another screenshot people passed around a lot back when the translation was first discovered
"anyting"
"Does she has a dream...? .........Doesn't looks so good."