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Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese

173 points by polm23 7y ago

corey_moncure 7y ago
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.
- reificator 7y ago
  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 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.
  - JimiofEden 7y ago
    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.
  - gnarbarian 7y ago
    GHOST BUSTERS
- ibatindev 7y ago
  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.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  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 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoony
  - hapless 7y ago
    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.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      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"?
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    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.
  - fenomas 7y ago
    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.
  - 7y ago
- xii22 7y ago
  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
  - fiblye 7y ago
    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.
- gambiting 7y ago
  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).
  - iainmerrick 7y ago
    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.)
  - sersi 7y ago
    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.
    - shawabawa3 7y ago
      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
- pdpi 7y ago
  > 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-who-shagged-me/quote_2493.html https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/austin-powers-the-spy-wh...
  - eru 7y ago
    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.
gatherhunterer 7y ago
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.
- anonu 7y ago
  That's usually why translators are called interpreters.
  - eropple 7y ago
    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.
  - aikinai 7y ago
    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.
fenomas 7y ago
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 https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/03/17/72229.html
- princeb 7y ago
  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.
  - fenomas 7y ago
    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.)
beebmam 7y ago
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
gnarbarian 7y ago
All your base are belong to us! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A 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!
SeanLuke 7y ago
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.
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  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.
- 29athrowaway 7y ago
  Sounds a lot like http://www.engrish.com/ http://www.engrish.com/
- jansan 7y ago
  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/TB2nUm9ni0TMKJjSZFNXXa_1FXa_!!948158.jpg https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i3/948158/TB2nUm9ni0TMKJjSZF...
29athrowaway 7y ago
"Translation server error" is the best translation I have seen.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  This deserves the picture: https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html
- astura 7y ago
  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 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-responsible-welsh-translation-gaffe-15214716 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-responsibl...
tkgally 7y ago
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.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  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.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  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.
umvi 7y ago
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) You can read more here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-monsters-in-japanese-super-mario-rpg/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-m...
murat124 7y ago
When I first played Modern Warfare years ago I thought "no Russian" meant don't kill any Russians. I guess I'm not smart.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
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...
- laurieg 7y ago
  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.
  - pdpi 7y ago
    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.
    - shifto 7y ago
      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.
  - ljm 7y ago
    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.
rolltiide 7y ago
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
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  You mean this? https://www.translationparty.com/ https://www.translationparty.com/
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    Yes, they had a disruption in api they used a long time ago Glad they found a solution
rolltiide 7y ago
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
hapless 7y ago
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!
greenyouse 7y ago
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?
greggman2 7y ago
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.
- agent008t 7y ago
  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.
Kootle 7y ago
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.
jhanschoo 7y ago
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)#Japan https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Beast_Wars:_Transformers_(cartoon)#J... https://www.reddit.com/r/transformers/comments/8zqixk/why_is_it_that_when_a_western_transformer_show_is/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0w6EffYfY
wodenokoto 7y ago
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)
jansan 7y ago
Why does "It enters the coin" remind me of The Silence of the Lambs?
euske 7y ago
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.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  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.
- hechang1997 7y ago
  This is very strange to me. Isn't Japanese supposedly to be very easy to rhyme due to its very simple phonetics?
  - toyg 7y ago
    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.
  - fenomas 7y ago
    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.
aasasd 7y ago
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.
innocentoldguy 7y ago
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.”
- glandium 7y ago
  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.
  - innocentoldguy 7y ago
    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.
    - syockit 7y ago
      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
      - fenomas 7y ago
        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.
WalterBright 7y ago
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.
1wd 7y ago
"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-translation-japanese-english-jeremy-blaustein https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20696081/metal-gear-solid-...
gwbas1c 7y ago
Sometimes I wonder if the mistranslations are left as-is just to make a joke?
etiam 7y ago
The biggest revelation for me for me here was on Metroid after clicking through to https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r-and-other-letters-in-japanese-translation/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r-and-o... (and by extension https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid-series-varia-suit/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid-seri...)

173 points by polm23 7y ago

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.

reificator 7y ago
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 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.
- JimiofEden 7y ago
  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.
- gnarbarian 7y ago
  GHOST BUSTERS
ibatindev 7y ago
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.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
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 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoony
- hapless 7y ago
  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.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    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"?
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  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.
- fenomas 7y ago
  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.
- 7y ago
xii22 7y ago
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
- fiblye 7y ago
  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.
gambiting 7y ago
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).
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  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.)
- sersi 7y ago
  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.
  - shawabawa3 7y ago
    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
pdpi 7y ago
> 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-who-shagged-me/quote_2493.html https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/austin-powers-the-spy-wh...
- eru 7y ago
  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.

gatherhunterer 7y ago

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.

anonu 7y ago
That's usually why translators are called interpreters.
- eropple 7y ago
  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.
- aikinai 7y ago
  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.

fenomas 7y ago

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 https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/03/17/72229.html

princeb 7y ago
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.
- fenomas 7y ago
  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.)

beebmam 7y ago

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

gnarbarian 7y ago

All your base are belong to us! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A 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!

SeanLuke 7y ago

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.

IIAOPSW 7y ago
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.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Sounds a lot like http://www.engrish.com/ http://www.engrish.com/
jansan 7y ago
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/TB2nUm9ni0TMKJjSZFNXXa_1FXa_!!948158.jpg https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i3/948158/TB2nUm9ni0TMKJjSZF...

29athrowaway 7y ago

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

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
This deserves the picture: https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html
astura 7y ago
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 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-responsible-welsh-translation-gaffe-15214716 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-responsibl...

tkgally 7y ago

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.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
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.
baroffoos 7y ago
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.

umvi 7y ago

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) You can read more here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-monsters-in-japanese-super-mario-rpg/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-m...

murat124 7y ago

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

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

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...

laurieg 7y ago
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.
- pdpi 7y ago
  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.
  - shifto 7y ago
    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.
- ljm 7y ago
  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.

rolltiide 7y ago

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

KozmoNau7 7y ago
You mean this? https://www.translationparty.com/ https://www.translationparty.com/
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Yes, they had a disruption in api they used a long time ago Glad they found a solution

rolltiide 7y ago

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

hapless 7y ago

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!

greenyouse 7y ago

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?

greggman2 7y ago

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.

agent008t 7y ago
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.

Kootle 7y ago

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.

jhanschoo 7y ago

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)#Japan https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Beast_Wars:_Transformers_(cartoon)#J... https://www.reddit.com/r/transformers/comments/8zqixk/why_is_it_that_when_a_western_transformer_show_is/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0w6EffYfY

wodenokoto 7y ago

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)

jansan 7y ago

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

euske 7y ago

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.

Mirioron 7y ago
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.
hechang1997 7y ago
This is very strange to me. Isn't Japanese supposedly to be very easy to rhyme due to its very simple phonetics?
- toyg 7y ago
  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.
- fenomas 7y ago
  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.

aasasd 7y ago

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.

innocentoldguy 7y ago

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.”

glandium 7y ago
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.
- innocentoldguy 7y ago
  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.
  - syockit 7y ago
    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
    - fenomas 7y ago
      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.

WalterBright 7y ago

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.

1wd 7y ago

"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-translation-japanese-english-jeremy-blaustein https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20696081/metal-gear-solid-...

gwbas1c 7y ago

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

etiam 7y ago

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