Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese | Hacker News Reader

Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese

legendsoflocalization.com

173 pointspolm23108 comments

There's a more elusive issue in translating English into Japanese that's often overlooked: the two languages have very different "axes" of freedom. One of such examples is honorifics. Japanese has a massive variety of words in different politeness, and it's very common for Japanese novels to exploit its freedom. But English has little varity in it, so this freedom is often not utilized in a translated Japanese. Another type of freedom is the creative use of Chinese characters. On the other hand, Japanese has almost no concept of rhymes (because its phonetics is not based on syllables), so it's very hard to convey the feel of rhyming in Japanese text (as a native Japanese guy, I still don't quite get it either). I don't think these "axes" are comparable in one way or another, and it probably adds another layer of difficulty.

I think this issue is kind of an opportunity. It teaches people about how different another culture can really be. I personally notice some of the nuance in translated works (into English though) and enjoy it. Based on these kinds of differences and word choice, it's sometimes possible for me to tell what the original language or cultural background (CN, KR or JP) of the translated work is. This kind of thing enhances the experience for me.

This is very strange to me. Isn't Japanese supposedly to be very easy to rhyme due to its very simple phonetics?

I suspect the issue is with the overall rhythm of the sentence - Japanese has its own conventions for intonation, formal rhyming in Romance languages requires an internal structure that may not be agreeable with that.

It's not so much a matter of ease or difficulty; rhyming just isn't really a thing in Japanese. I mean, there's a term for it, which I've heard people use when discussing haiku (to refer to internal rhyme or even consonance), but for the most part it's not a thing and people aren't aware of it.

Several times over the years I've had the "hey, were you aware that virtually every English song rhymes from start to finish?" conversation with a number of native JP speakers, and in every case so far they were very surprised. And even when the person is quite fluent in English, although they get the concept intellectually they always have a lot of trouble discerning the rhymes unaided.

It might well be that it's easy to the point it's unremarkable.

This is correct. In Japanese it's so easy to rhyme things that rhymes just aren't interesting or unusual.

Japanese rap tries to make the rhymes more interested by rhyming multiple syllables instead of just one.

Do you mean "meter" when you say rhyme? Because there's two things I can see here. First, one of the things that English poetry does is the tones and lengths of syllables are meant to be read in a certain way to create a certain rhythm, almost like creating a song (or more accurately, a rap). Then again, Japanese rap does exist so maybe not?

The second is that there are only five Japanese vowels and each one creates a single syllable nucleus, so every character rhymes with 20% of every other character, so there's no real skill, and hence, no real point in rhyming? (Whereas English has far more syllable nuclei and words can vary between one to many, many syllables, so certain words are quite hard to rhyme)

He means rhyming as in words ending in the same vowel+final consonants. Japanese syllables are very simple, and typically lack final consonants (except for the nasal phoneme n/m).

There are two aspects to meter; the placement of stressed syllables and the placement of syllables of different lengths itself. Actually English as opposed to Greek and Romance languages that are not French has stress patterns that are highly dependent on the phrase rather than on syllable position in words, and so traditional forms are felt to be quite artificial in English, and perhaps this encouraged the development of free meter in modern English poetry.

Anyway, the stress aspect of meter I don't think features greatly in Japanese poetry. On the other hand, meter still features prominently in Japanese standard poetic forms; are characterized as having a set number of syllables in each line, but renku looks instead at the number of morae (short syllables have one; long have two).

> Japanese syllables are very simple, and typically lack final consonants

So do Italian words, but we still have plenty of rhymes. From my almost non-existing Japanese knowledge, I don't really get what you mean.

I'm sorry, I didn't intend to make a case for Japanese not rhyming with what I mentioned. I intended to illustrate how rhyming looks like in Japanese, but rereading my comment it does indeed look like that.

I just wanted to establish that Japanese poems were characterized primarily by # of syllables or # of morae, and were quite free in their distribution of stressed syllables or long/short (heavy/light) syllables, as opposed to most European forms.

I'd also like to address a misconception of the original comment I was responding to that rhyming in poetry is prevalent in a language because it takes skill. It's primarily a matter of poetic tradition whether a language's poetry cares about rhyme. As darkwater's comment points out, Italian has plenty of rhymes and its poetic forms use rhyming extensively.

I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure I've heard rhymes in Japanese (mostly rap) songs. They are rare, though. But they also can span more than one syllable.

A lot of English-language rap songs have complicated rhyme schemes (much more than single-syllable) as well!

Rakim (of Eric B. & Rakim) was one of the first to take this to new heights.

An example from "Lyrics of Fury", with the rhyming words emphasized in caps:

    The SCENE of the CRIME every NIGHT at the SHOW 

    The FIEND of the RHYME on the MIC that you KNOW

https://genius.com/Eric-b-and-rakim-lyrics-of-fury-lyrics

They give a good example of a problem with translating politeness into English, and the different ways translators (mis)manage it, in one of the linked articles: https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-iv/damcyan/#...

Translation is always difficult, but especially so when the translator does not know the overall context and intended use of the text. If one is translating a novel, most of the context necessary to understand, say, a line of dialogue is right on the page. According to a talk I heard about twenty years ago by a game translator working between Japanese and English, however, at that time all translators usually had to work with were isolated bits of text in Excel files. No wonder so many mistakes have crept into localized video games.

In her talk, she stressed the importance of actually playing through the game while translating, but said that the finished game often wasn't available and that deadlines or low translation rates could make that unfeasible.

I was a freelance translator myself at the time, mostly doing business-related texts, and her talk did not make me want to go into video game translation.

I recently played through a PC platformer called Rive. The voice actor was actually really good (and voiced both protagonist and the antagonist in completely different styles), but it was painfully obvious that (a) English wasn't the dialogue writer's first language, and (b) they'd given the the script to the voice actor as standalone strings, so his tone and emphasis didn't always make sense in context.

Not quite the same thing, but another consequence of the person creating the final dialogue not having access to context, and there's really no excuse for that. Even if the dialogue is only available as a spreadsheet, the writer should have included context cues and stage directions.

I recently had an experience getting software translated to Japanese. Just to test things while the translators were working I ran the all the yml files through google translate and then when we got the proper translations back I had a look at some of the things that changed that I would not expect to.

One interesting one is we had translations for status indicators (Red, Amber, Green) The real translator had translated these to the Japanese versions of Red, Yellow and Green but google translated had picked the word for "fossilized resin" rather than the color.

Since google translate is not using any context it has no way to know if I meant the color or the material.

FYI, google translate for Japanese is pretty unreliable for lone uncommon words. It seems to rely heavily on internet-trained ML, and does pretty well with phrases and sentences, but for single words I see it return nonsense fairly often.

As an alternative, https://jisho.org/ is super easy to use and hasn't let me down yet.

In the other direction, I've seen gtl invert the meaning of sentences on subtle variations of the なければ pattern, which is probably a fairly small error in the problem space but, well, inverts the meaning of the sentence. A good reminder that parallel corpus machine learning does not see the world the same way you do.

Personally, when I'm checking a translation, I like to use WWWJDIC's text glossing mode: https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T

The thing with my Japanese skills is that my grammar is excellent, but my vocabulary is limited, so a gloss of the kanji in a sentence is _massively_ useful to me (and kanji is a double-edged sword: I recognize far more words in hiragana (or when spoken) than in kanji, but kanji is pretty much necessary for a dictionary to have any decent idea of what the word is).

I'll have to give Jisho a try though.

Fun question: did the translators use green or blue for the green translation? Green (midori) is a newish word and semaphores, traditionally, use blue (aoi) when referring to the green light.

This is something I assume translators would be able to catch that would be much more difficult for translation software.

I wonder if the talk you heard was related to this[0]?

It's a good read. They also were working with massive spreadsheets, but also with a huge franchise that required a lot of internal consistency.

[0]: https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-big...

One great example of that was how in some later Sims game (2 or 3), one of the actions possible on a bonsai tree in the Swedish version is "Katrinplommon", translated from "prune" - unfortunately, prune as in a dried plum, not the pruning of plants.

Ah, nice! I guess all languages have legions of these. In Norway, dell sold computers with “brannkabel”, or “burn cable” [1].

[1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.

Considering the eventual hackability of Firewire, maybe the translation was prescient... you’re gonna get burnt by that cable!

That makes no sense in context of Norwegian as "get burnt by" is an English idiom.

Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose.

Translation is difficult..

Would it be normal to not translate these into languages that share the Latin alphabet at least?

In English most nouns can also be a verb, or vice versa, without the word changing at all. In some ways it is a feature, but it also leads to terrible outcomes like this. Words like "comment" and "reply" are often translated without context to the wrong class of word.

I have experience in this. I translated exclusive Japanese-only content for a game for the PSP from Japanese into English (fan translation, not professional). At the time, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. It was just myself and a python hacker who was extracting the script, and I was essentially handed the entire script within a Google Sheets document.

Given how context-heavy Japanese is, it was nearly impossible to translate exactly what was going on as the Google Sheets only contained the additional content and not the full game script. Even if I did have the game script, there are still certain contextual things which are only realized when seeing what was happening to the characters on the screen.

I ended up watching an entire "Let's Play" of the series in order to get the gist of the story, get the character names correct, and see how the original translators localized everything. I took cues from their localization and did the best take I could at the time in order to translate it while balancing heavy workloads at school.

I'm both somewhat proud of the translation and somewhat disappointed in it. I feel as if I could do a much better job if I had more free time to update it, but localization is kinda like an art. Very few people will translate the same content the same way - even the same person might translate the same lines differently at different points in time.

I do something completely different these days and don't get to utilize my Japanese nearly as much, but I'd definitely be up for another game translation again. While you may be bound by certain external forces (pre-localized content you need to mesh with, author's wishes, censorship, etc), there is still a lot of freedom and liberty in localizing. After all, it's your job to retell this story as best you can to your target audience, and it requires both knowing the source material's culture, as well as your own. In fact, it probably requires knowing your target culture even more so, and it's this type of creative challenge that really got me excited back in the day.

I've seen Let's Plays of the Japanese translation of Portal and felt that it misses the sardonic notes of GLaDOS' script, and as a result falls completely flat. In my opinion, this aspect is essential to the Portal experience. It's not that I couldn't think of how to express certain lines in Japanese, rather it just seemed that the translation team didn't get the jokes at all.

That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult. Sometimes you're lucky and there's a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that's recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category. All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.

Having grown up with "spoony bard", "this guy are sick" and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren't a one-way street.

Ouch. Portal is one of my favorites, but partly because I really loved GLaDOS. (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System)

Without her constant prodding at you, I think the game would lose both charm and player motivation. I'd imagine the pacing takes a hit as a result.

Here's one of my favorite examples of a bad translation to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFg6QOlV-EE

It's an NES game, but before I spoil it for you, try to figure out which one by letting the music play out.

I quote that Congalturation screen when my wife completes a game (great or otherwise.) In return, she got me a book of bad translations/localizations for our anniversary.

GHOST BUSTERS

Totally! I thought Portal 2 was going to be the perfect game to play when I had spare time in the office but without GLaDOS's clever lines -and the way it says them- it wasn't even enjoyable.

I'm not entirely sure you meant it that way, but "spoony bard" is not a bad translation, as evidenced by its inclusion in every official translation of FF4 since Woolsey's. The bard is indeed spoony[0], and it is the kind of archaic language you might expect from an old man like Tellah.

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoony

It's a correct translation, but funny because of its stilted language.

It would have been merely old-timey in Japanese, but in English it's rendered as centuries-old vernacular. "Spoony" ceased to be common language in the 19th century. "Bard" in the 18th, except in limited senses referencing archaic usage. No one is that old!

It's not wrong, just a little too far.

You'll note that in the fantasy genre, such archaic words as bard are actually quite common, so I don't think 'spoony' is ridiculous at all. It is not uncommon for media to use completely made up words, why is pulling a single instance of an archaic one "too far"?

Unless you're actually writing a Shakespeare send-up, using a centuries-obsolete word is definitely bad translation. Just because a word is in the dictionary doesn't mean it means it means anything to your audience.

It's still included because it's an iconic gag at this point. It's still a bad translation, but they know fans love it, and that's okay.

The dialog in question is being said in a fit of rage, to someone that the speaker believes has seduced and stolen his daughter, leading to her death. Using a comically archaic term for "unduly sentimental" in a spot like that is certainly a bad translation.

If the original translation was punched-up all the way through, I might be inclined to agree, but it wasn't. It was the only archaism in a game that was otherwise translated into modern English. The only version of FF4 to have a punched-up TL was the 3D version (only available on DS/PC/iOS/Android). If it had debuted there, it might not have been too out of place, but it was certainly out of place in FF2u.

And as fenomas pointed out, it was exclaimed in a fit of violent rage. That is not the kind of thing one would bark out in a situation like that.

The reason why it's in every single FF4 translation is because it's such a ludicrously bad translation that it came out the other side and ended up funny. It wasn't intended to be a comedic scene, but it's become one in the minds of English-speaking fans.

(Also, Woolsey never translated FF4... he just did FF6, plus a TL of FF5 that never saw the light of day because Square pulled the plug on the US release on account of the game being "too complicated" for Americans. And while Woolsey is a master of dialogue who contributed a lot of iconic lines, his Japanese comprehension was actually pretty poor, and his FF6 introduced a number of plot holes that weren't in the JP version. The GBA translation is objectively better, and if you want both a good TL _and_ Woolsey's dialogue, there's a romhack out there called the Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition that combines the most iconic lines from Woolsey's script with a translation based on Legends of Localization's thorough analysis of the script.)

I still don't get where people are coming from on this. It's a fictional reality filled with fictional physics and a bunch of made up words. But a technically-correct archaism gets everyone's panties in a twist?

Also, I honestly thought Woolsey wrote that line because it was so his style. Apparently this is a common misconception.

So, out of curiosity, I looked up the original Japanese, and it's also just a total non sequitor in English but the original Japanese line actually follows from the conversation.

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/You_spoony_bard!

> Tellah

> original: きさまあの時の吟遊詩人！きさまのせいでアンナは！

> literal: You! You're that damn bard! Because of you, Anna's...! (The word used for both instances of "you" is "kisama", the single rudest way to say "you" in Japanese. Because of its harshness, "kisama" is somewhat akin to "you bastard" or "you son of a bitch" in English.)

> SNES: You're the bard! You did this to her!

> Edward

> !?

> Tellah

> original: きさまよくも娘を・・・・

> literal: How dare you do this to my daughter... (Again, "kisama" is used for "you".)

> SNES: You swindler!

> Edward

> original: ちがうんです！

> literal: It's not like that!

> SNES: Please! Listen!

> Tellah

> original: なにがちがうというのだ！

> literal: How the hell could it not be like that!?

> SNES: You spoony bard!

I'm all for localizations that take liberties with the translation (see: the best parts of Woolsey's dialogue in FF6), but looking at this in context, it makes no sense. Woolsey's famous lines, like "Welcome to my barbecue!", belonged in context and didn't look out of place. This is just a non sequitor.

If you asked me to give a localized angry response to "Please! Listen!", I'd probably go with something like "I'm not listening to YOU!". Or if I wanted to be silly with it, "Why would I do that, bard-brain?" (OK, I'm not the best dialogue writer...).

So you're saying that you find it odd that someone would express their desire not to listen to someone else by actually not listening to them and just continuing to insult them?

On your Portal point, the reason for that is that sarcasm as humor is not really a 'thing' in Japan, in general terms. Some people go as far as saying that the Japanese do not understand sarcasm, but that's an exaggeration

Yeah, it’s generally just regarded as mean.

On the contrary, I’ve found it’s something that most other Asian countries get really well, so the difficulty seems to mostly be limited to Japan.

I remember being shocked when I watched Shrek for the first time in English - all the jokes were different than how I remembered it(I watched it in Polish for the first time)! But well, thinking about it, that makes perfect sense - English jokes translated literally into Polish wouldn't have been anywhere near as funny - so the translators took a bit of a creative liberty and changed them to work with Polish audiences, even inserting some Polish pop-culture references where appropriate. And yeah, I remember it being incredibly funny and in comparison the English version is just....different(not to mention all the voices are just....wrong lol).

It brings up an interesting question though - do we care about the outcome(the film being funny) or about being "correct". After all, Polish translation of Shakespeare doesn't change the meaning just to be more relatable to Poles. But then again, books like Harry Potter had plenty of changes to work in Polish(like the Sphinx's riddle being completely different in Polish just so it would make any sense - I would argue that one was kind of necessary though).

Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot is a great read, and discusses these issues in depth. (Hofstadter is strongly on the side of creative rather than literal translations.)

I remember as a kid seeing an representation of Shakespeare's Twelfth's night in French as a kid and the meaning was changed so that the jokes would work in French. Likewise, it was made to rhyme in French. I do believe that even in older works, it makes more sense to translate in a creative way. After all, those works were written to convey comedy or poetry and if a translation fails to convey that, then the translation failed.

Likewise, when Baudelaire translated Edgar Poe, the translation literal as it would have been a failure to convey the poetry of the text.

I've actually heard that french translations of shakespeare are "better" than the english originals, as they modernise it a bit, whereas the english version is left in an archaic form of english where a lot of the rhymes and puns no longer work

That's a good point. One could argue that Shakespeare's early modern English feels like a different dialect of English and as such would be better translated during representations...

> (not to mention all the voices are just....wrong lol).

Happens to me with the Simpsons.

> All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.

There's a few specific cases of this that I quite like — the English translations of Asterix did a tremendous job of renaming all the characters in a way that's consistent with the spirit of the (idiomatically french) original jokes.

A personal favourite of mine, though, is a particular dialogue from Austin Powers[1] where the Portuguese subtitles found a joke that was just not there in the original. "It's a bit nutty" doesn't have a good idiomatic translation, so they instead translated it as "Tem muita borra" — Literally, "there's a lot of grounds in this", but "borra" can be read as either "grounds" or "poop".

1. https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/austin-powers-the-spy-wh...

The German names for the Asterix characters are also great.

And you can get translations of some of the comics into various German dialects as well.

This reminds me of an interview I read with the guy who did the Japanese localization of Overwatch (a game that I imagine this article would mention if it was updated).

The interviewer asks what the localizer thought about all the weird Japanese dialog and copy in the English version of the game, and he answers to the effect that: a lot of the text would definitely be out of place in a Japanese title, but on the other hand it kind of fit with the game's off-kilter style. He likened it to the way Hollywood movies often indiscriminately mix Asian cultures together, saying he was fond of the effect, and that "fixing" everything in localization might break the humor. So when Blizzard asked him for input he says his answer was "Frankly the Japanese is pretty messed up but let's go with it".

source (JP): https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/03/17/72229.html

the two japanese characters in overwatch were more "blizzard" than japanese. one of them, before doing some special skill, would shout "taste my blade" in japanese. unsurprisingly, this phrase also appeared in the warcraft series as part of the blademasters voice lines. the other yells something like "dragon devour my enemies".

it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.

the game is nice, but those two characters just feel very not-japanese, even with all japanese work for them.

The "shout the name of the move" thing is neither here nor there, I think. Overwatch isn't a fighting game, and voice lines like that aren't common in shooters (Japanese or otherwise).

For the rest, I'd guess it's a simple matter of Blizzard not having anybody in house who can check content. They've never done JP versions for any of their games, and the mistakes they make tend to be of the "copy/pasted from Google translate" variety. Also the 3rd-party localizer in the interview mentioned Blizzard asking him to check their Japanese, even though that would have been pretty late in the process.

(One also suspects that the JP voice lines may largely be the work of the voice actors. That would explain why Genji (voiced by a native speaker) has tons of Japanese voice lines, while Hanzo speaks only English outside of his ult.)

> it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.

While, yeah, calling your attacks is common, I've also seen Kurae! ("Eat this!") in anime and toku more times than I can count. Honestly, that would make a good translation for those phrases...

> The interviewer asks what the localizer thought about all the weird Japanese dialog and copy in the English version of the game, and he answers to the effect that: a lot of the text would definitely be out of place in a Japanese title, but on the other hand it kind of fit with the game's off-kilter style.

You remind me of something I noticed while reading the Temeraire novels. The protagonist receives a Chinese dragon, and there's a plotline in which they travel to China to argue that he should be allowed to keep his dragon. This introduces enough Chinese dragons that we can get a feel for how they are named -- there is a very regular system.

Each dragon is referred to by a combination of their species and a given name. Temeraire is a celestial dragon, 天龙, and his Chinese name is 龙天翔 (in the book, "Lung Tien Xiang"). "Lung Yu Ping", 龙玉平, is a jade dragon, 玉龙. They're all like that except for 龙李白. (李白 is the name of a historical person who, in the world of the novels, was a dragon instead. I guess it's possible that there's a "plum dragon" variety, but no such species is mentioned - I doubt the author put that much thought into it.)

This bothered me the whole time, since two parts of the system are backwards. First, obviously, the species name gets flipped around in the name of the dragon. Second, normal Chinese practice is to put titles after the name, not before.

But I asked a Chinese friend about this and her response was: yes, it's weird for the species name to be flipped around. However, the style the book uses sounds nice compared to the normal way.

So yes, sometimes random bungling can produce something that natives appreciate for stylistic reasons.

i'm not familiar with the temeraire novels, but based on your description the naming system makes total sense to me - and definitely sounds more natural to native ears.

it looks like they're using personal name conventions for the dragons rather than species names. for example, in the name 龙玉平, 龙 would be the surname/family name, and 玉平 would be the given name.

the 'family name' is shared amongst all dragons, while dragons of the same species share the same first syllable in their given names. this mirrors how chinese siblings will often share a syllable in their given names (sometimes known as 'generation names').

not sure if any of this is intentional, of course - but from my perspective, those names work well to humanize the dragons.

> definitely sounds more natural to native ears.

Well, when I described the system to my friend, her very first response was to ask 不应该叫天龙翔，玉龙平吗 ["shouldn't they be called 天龙翔 / 玉龙平?"]. So based on my single informant, I don't quite agree that the system in the novels sounds "more natural" to natives. Something can be good style without being the most natural way of expressing the concept.

A friend of mine did some freelance Japanese-to-English translation for a video game you've heard of some time ago. Her source material consisted, in entirety, of an Excel spreadsheet with one column called "Japanese" (filled) and another called "English" (empty). That's it: she never even saw the game in question, and wasn't familiar with the series in general either. And then we wonder why the translations are bad...

This is maddeningly common, even these days.

Unfortunately, many mono-lingual people don't realise that language does not map perfectly from one word/phrase to another.

When I used to translate people in the office would come up and ask me "What's xxxxx in English?". I would reply "Well, what situation is this?". More often than not they would switch off at this point.

I'm more or less bilingual (Portuguese/English), and it annoys me to no end how often I have the exact word I want, but it's in the "wrong" language. Often, the alternatives in the "right" language just lack the appropriate connotation/subtext.

I feel this about language in general. Sometimes it takes way too many words or sentences to convey what I mean.

I think it's time we develop some cool telepathy tech.

I’m not fluently bi-lingual but this is my go-to answer whenever someone’s asked me how to say a certain thing in English, when they’re writing or figuring out how to talk to someone else. My questions usually would be:

1. How would you say it in [original language?]. This is on the off-chance I know what they’re talking about, or can reasonably guess. Sometimes this is good enough that they get what they want out of it. Also, I get to learn a little bit more of their language, if it’s one that I’ve also learned a bit about :)

2. What are you trying to say/what’s the context? This is to get around the X/Y problem, because usually the question isn’t so simple.

It’s rare to have a straight up, correct answer the moment someone asks how to translate. And if it does come up so easily, they were already speaking good English in the first place. Just needed the vocab.

There used to be a requirement that anyone receiving an academic degree has to demonstrate proficiency in a second language. The purpose is not so you could use the second language, instead the purpose is that learning a second language forces you to understand that all the details of your own native language are arbitrary, understand the abstract notion of "language" separately from your native one, and as part of that understand that many parts of your native language encode pieces of your native culture and are not universal, and thus cannot be translated directly. This understanding of how language works was part of what made you a "college educated" person, who has a better understanding of the world.

Has this requirement been dropped, or are diploma mills able to graduate students who can speak a little Spanish but do not understand the important bits about how human languages work?

This is also far-too-frequently the market standard for translation of "substantially everything else", including for things where incorrect translation does not normally result in fun internet memes as the worst possible consequence.

I enjoyed plugging these into translate.google.com to see what machine translation made of poor applications of Japanese.

The best one was the "Brutality Bonus," which after re-translation from the developer's Japanese, came back as something like "Allowance for Atrocities." Not wrong, but hilariously off-kilter. It still makes complete sense, but it utterly fails to convey the original tone.

I can see, at some remove, why this stuff is funny!

Opposite direction, but Super Mario RPG's localization team apparently didn't get half of the pop-culture and cross-game references of Mallow's "psychopath" ability and the net result is that English "psychopath" text is hilariously non-sensical.

For example, if you use "psychopath" on Magikoopa, the English translation is "That's... my child?" which makes zero sense. A better localization would have been "You're that baby from that one time!?" - a reference to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

There's also a Donkey Kong-looking enemy named "Guerilla" whose psychopath text is "Don't confuse me with someone else!" In Japanese though, the enemy's name is more like "Dankey Kang" and his psychopath text is "This character has no relation to any persons, living or dead. Any resemblance is purely coincidental." (apparently this particular case was more due to memory constraints than the localization team "not getting it" though)

On a related note, I'd like to highlight two localizations that completely parodied their source material:

from English -> Japanese, there's Transformers: Beast wars

I can't find subtitled clips of them, so I'll just link to discussions on what changed.

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Beast_Wars:_Transformers_(cartoon)#J...

https://www.reddit.com/r/transformers/comments/8zqixk/why_is...

In the other direction, you have Ghost Stories. I'll let this clip compilation do the talking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0w6EffYfY

Going the other way. When I lived in Japan I would collect Japanese products with unfortunate English names or ad copy. And there were so many. "Angel Relief" cookies ("Relieve the Relief!"). Dunk Beer. Grape and Lemon "Skat" drink. Creep. But easily my favorite were boxes of Kleenex which showed up regularly at my local 7-11. They were festooned with cute pictures of puppies or kittens. But on the outside they said simply "Tissues of Puppy" or "Tissues of Kitten".

Japanese friends would ask why this was so horrifying sounding. I gave up explaining what "tissues" meant beyond Kleenex. So I eventually asked them to consider how you might get a "tissue of puppy", perhaps by freezing the puppy and then slicing very thinly. They got the idea.

There's an obscure island somewhere in Japan where they force the native Pocari to do hard labor and then they get wrung out like wet laundry for their sweet Pocari Sweat.

Sounds a lot like http://www.engrish.com/

I received a phosphorescent Sony Beans Walkman as a gift from my gym in Tokyo. It read "They grow in the dark!" on the package.

Here is an image. The orange one has the type, while on the others it seems to be corrected. https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i3/948158/TB2nUm9ni0TMKJjSZF...

All your base are belong to us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A

Growing up in the 80s I remember thinking that this was just a quirky aspect of vidja games. I mean I understood it and it was weird. but it didn't register as bad English until I was older.

a winner is you!

When I first played Modern Warfare years ago I thought "no Russian" meant don't kill any Russians. I guess I'm not smart.

This person (Clyde Mandelin aka Tomato) did the fan translation/localization of Mother 3 into English. That game profoundly affected my life and I'm so thankful to him for making it possible for me to experience it

The odd thing about the “all your base” line is that it communicates the correct meaning in a way that is obviously incorrect and that is why it is so funny and memorable. When the language is technically correct but mistranslates the meaning it is easier for a mistranslation to go unnoticed or to be subjected to over-analysis in order to justify the poor translation, as detailed in the article.

Translation and interpretation belong to a nuanced inter-lingual skillset. One cannot expect anyone who speaks two languages fluently to correctly translate text between the two.

That's usually why translators are called interpreters.

Interpreters are a type of translator. The reverse is not true, generally speaking.

There is also localization, which is what Clyde (the article author) does, and it incorporates both translation and cultural understanding.

Interpreter is a more precise term for verbal translator; it doesn’t apply to written translation and has nothing to do with how much interpretation to expect in the translation.

When the Olympics were in Beijing a few years back, a fast food vendor hung a large banner behind his establishment that read "404 Not Found".

He'd evidently typed his food offerings into a translator, and printed the result on his banner.

Russian had its fair share of funny bad translations. In a pirate version of Starcraft (I think), ‘Overmind’ was translated as ‘надмозг’, which is pretty much ‘above-brain’. So for most of the 2000s, ‘надмозг’ was slang for bad translators.

Random comments

* Translation is hard. If you needed something translated to Japanese how would you know it was well done? Maybe you personally have a bunch of Japanese friends or colleagues but most people don't. And so it is going the other way.

* Especially for games/movies/books translation is not enough. The content needs to be localized. For example jokes need to be funny in the target language. Subtle innuendo in the original language needs to be translated into subtle innuendo in the target language. Cultural references need to be translated into relevant cultural references in the target culture, etc. One company that specializes in game localization (not just translation) is 8-4.jp. They handle not just translation and localization of text but even managing voice work etc...

* I've always wished RockStar would make GTA Tokyo (they'd need a ton of local input or a local team). I bring up GTA because so much of those games, at least for me, are full of things that have not been localized and would be nearly impossible to localize unless the game itself took place in the target country. The hardest part is probably the radio stations. Driving around in GTA3 (and the sequels) brought back for me some uncanny feeling of actually driving with the radio on. The DJs, the ads, the different channels from talk channels to the various music genres. You'd need local DJs making local sounding comments about locally popular songs or parodies of those songs, local talk radio, local public service announcements, etc, etc, etc... Also the posters, signs, store names, around the city would all need to be localized so they evoke the same feeling of being in on the joke. And of course hearing local actors voice the characters vs just subtitles. Subtitles for characters dialog is the only thing that's been localized in any GTA game so Japan has never actually experienced one. I'm not even sure the random NPCs get translations but all of that would need to be made into something locals would get. I have no idea if a full localization would be a hit, especially now given console/PC games in Japan are mostly dead, but I've been disappointed that I could never share that experience with my Japanese gamer friends.

There is Sleeping Dogs. Not quite the same, but interesting to experience GTA-like mechanics in Hong Kong. And at night with rain it looks very cyberpunk.

"The bizarre, true story of Metal Gear Solid’s English translation - Written by the man who did it" is quite a fun behind-the-scenes story about Japanese-to-English translation. Apparently the original creators did not appreciate creative translation that improve flow, and preferred to go with more nonsensical but "accurate" (word-by-word) translations for the sequels.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20696081/metal-gear-solid-...

The biggest revelation for me for me here was on Metroid after clicking through to https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r-and-o... (and by extension https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid-seri...)

"Translation server error" is the best translation I have seen.

This deserves the picture: https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

The same sort of thing happened in Wales, the result was an out of office email auto-reply ended up on a roadsign.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-responsibl...

I asked my Japanese colleagues for what the correct way to say 'koin ikko ireru' would be, but none of them thought it sounded funny.

There isn’t anything wrong with saying “koin o ireru” in this context in Japanese. The phrase is correct. “Koin ikko ireru” is weird, but not because of the lack of verb conjugation. The problem is that the sentence structure is grammatically incorrect and the counter is wrong in this context. It should be “koin o hitotsu ireru.”

The counter for coins is mai or ko. Ikko is thus correct. Only wo is missing for perfect grammar, but in informal spoken japanese, it's often omitted. So overall the sentence is correct... except for the conjugation. Because ireru doesn't really invite to insert a coin.

No, it is not correct in this context. If you are speaking with your friends, then it is OK to say “ikko.” However, in an instructional setting, which this is, “hitotsu” is the correct phrasing. “Ko” is used in casual situations. I have been localizing software, manuals, marketing materials, training documents, scientific papers, etc. for over two decades with native Japanese speakers. I’m also married to one. Trust me on this.

Well, this is an arcade machine, and the setting is much more casual, so ikko is just as acceptable. The problem is, as GP pointed out, with ireru. I can think of some alternatives

1. koin wo ikko irete kudasai 2. koin wo ikko ireru no da! 3. koin ikko irete! 4. koin ikko ireru no! 5. koin ikko irenai? 6. koin ikko irenai ka? 7. koin wo ikko ireru to purei dekiru

This whole thread misses the point - the "correct", natural-sounding text for the situation was simply "INSERT COIN". That's what ~every other machine of the era used, and what players expected.

Of course, there are other correct alternatives in Japanese. That is not my point. The article makes two statements that are not correct:

1. "koin ikko ireru" is wrong because of the verb conjugation. The reason it is wrong is that "ikko" is something kids say to each other, or that parents say to their kids, and is weird/incorrect to say in a context where teens and adults are involved. It is also missing the "o" (or "wo," if you prefer).

2. "koin o ireru" is incorrect, again because of verb conjugation. There is nothing wrong with this phrase.

Of course, you could say コインを入れてください, コインを一つ入れる, コインを一枚入れる, コインを入れる, Insert Coin, and other variations on that theme. My only point is that the two asserts above are incorrect in the article.

I also didn't feel that anything was wrong with using 入れる instead of 入れてください. If it's already clear a process or instruction is being explained, sometimes you don't use a grammatical command - I've seen it before.

I don't think "ko is informal" is entirely true. Based on my few years in Japan, plus just now looking up "ko" dictionary to look for any nuance I've missed, it seems like "ko" is fine even in formal contexts, especially if it's used for (semi) mathematical purposes.

If I search Google for "リンゴ１つ" (one apple) it automatically matches it with pages that use "リンゴ１個". Also, the latter is much more common than the former looking at the first 10 results, and the latter appears in otherwise formal-sounding phrases like "りんご1個は、中くらいのサイズで300g前後なので、1個あたりのカロリーは、約183kcalとなります。"

Are coins normally counted with ko (個)? I'm as bad with counters as the next guy, but I'd expected something a little more flat-sounding. A cursory google check seems that indicate that the internet agree that it should be mai (枚)

Does anyone know the history behind the Pokemon green translation (or maybe pocket monster green). I remember that there were some roms with pretty funny translations. Was that the unofficial English port before Pokemon Blue was released?

Why does "It enters the coin" remind me of The Silence of the Lambs?

Sometimes I wonder if the mistranslations are left as-is just to make a joke?

I wish Translation Party was still around, where it translated English into Japanese and then back to English 30 times so you can see how unintelligible it becomes

I do this when I am using google translate even if I am familiar with a language

You mean this?

https://www.translationparty.com/

Yes, they had a disruption in api they used a long time ago Glad they found a solution

Nice a Mahoujin Guru Guru reference, its is definitely worth a watch if you can find it

I think its English name was “Magic Circle Guru Guru” or Magic people Guru Guru

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