< Blind Idiot Translation

Blind Idiot Translation/Video Games

Game of the computer (Video Games)

  • The classic "YOU'RE WINNER" trophy at the end of every race (literally every race, because you can't possibly lose) in Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.
  • The Spanish version of Diablo 2 had several with the names of the monsters and items:
    • Unraveler -- Desenrredador (Untangler)
    • Overseer -- El que todo lo ve (The one that sees everything)
    • The Necromancer Head items -- Translated as "Leader", so you got things like "Leader of the Zombies", "Leader of the Unravelers Untanglers" and "Leader of the Demons" (Hey, isn't it Diablo this one? You've already won the game!)
      • And the infamous Great Poleaxe, translated as "El Gran Pollax", with literally means "The big cock". This, combined with the suffixes and prefixes, may lead to things like "The hard big cock", "The relaxing big cock" and such.
    • The French version translated the Eldritch Orb as "Orbe d'Eltrich", as in "Eldritch's Orb", probably having no idea what 'eldritch' means.
      • Still can work as you can translate it "Orb of Eldritch" which, while cumbersome, can work.
  • 2027 had this in the English version of the mod, since it was originally in Russian.
  • The first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers has things like HARRY UP and TOTLE.
  • Halo Zero experiences this, remember, kill the covenants!
  • Oddly enough, the infamous line "I AM ERROR." from Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link, though mistakenly assumed by many to be a case of Blind Idiot Translation, is actually correct. Another character is called Bagu, a literal romanisation of the Japanese transliteration of "bug". "Bug" and "Error" go together fairly well, wouldn't you say? Besides which, you're told later in the game by someone else that Error has some information you need.
    • Zelda II did have some examples of... unusual translation, though, particularly the classic "If all else fails use fire." It means to use the Fire spell on armored enemies, but when just offered on its own (as it is) it becomes rather unintentionally hilarious and seems to be encouraging pyromania.
      • Note that the original Japanese version of Zelda II has a lot of clunky lines too, due to having way too little space to fit way too much information into.
    • The original game's intro text has this classic: "Many years ago, Prince Darkness Gannon Banned stole one of the Triforce with Power."
    • This actually significantly increased the difficulty of the games for English speakers, since a number of lines intended to reveal locations of important treasures or future dungeons got completely mangled, thereby leaving players with no clue where to go next. For example, a message intended to reveal the location of the Magic Key (which is pretty much required for completing the final dungeon due to the absurd number of locked doors) got rendered as "10th enemy has the bomb".
    • GAME OVER. RETURN OF GANON.
    • Even ignoring how stupid the Character's names sound in the German version of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, there are several inconsistencies in the translation (like the timespan passed since the founding of New Hyrule varying between 100 and a few 100 years) and when Zelda loses control over a Phantom due to leaving the dungeon section of the tower of spirits, she says "It looks like before again..." instead of "I went back to normal...".
  • The Overmind from StarCraft was blatantly translated in Russian as "Nadmozg" ("Abovebrain"). Later it was adapted as a nickname for a poor translator (usually of movies or video games).
    • It was picked up and used as a forced meme by another translator. Who in turn is known for catering to the teens by overusing obscenities rather than for providing steadily good translation. With "adaptations" like "Jesus Christ!" -> "... your mother!" (The Sopranos). Why, it's exclamation too.
    • There's a glaring example in the Hungarian translation of one of the books, Shadow of the Xel'Naga: the phrase "Wanderers from Afar" (canonical poetic name of the Protoss) was translated as "Wanderers of Afar". As in, Afar remaining un-translated; resulting in "Afar Vándorai" instead of "Messzi Vándorok". The translator probably didn't know that "afar" is an English word too...
  • Possibly the ultimate repository of Engrish videogame examples would be the Zany VG Quotes page, all complete with screenshot and (pithy) caption. Witness Romeo and Juliet built only with (slightly tweaked) videogame quotes, you strange, unmasked fellows, and don't go to heaven!
    • "You strange, unmasked fellow. Don't go to heaven!" is actually a direct translation from the original Japanese version.
      • And makes sense in context. Earthbound is a strange, strange game.
  • In Company of Heroes, the online multiplayer modes for the French version of the game was translated from "2v2 AT" (meaning 2 versus 2, arranged teams) as "2v2 Anti-Tank" (In French).
  • All your base are belong to us.
    • For great justice!
    • Somebody set up us the bomb! (Which could be taken to mean "Please prepare a bomb with which to attack the enemy" as well as the intended meaning of "Oh no, there's a bomb on our ship!")
  • The Warhammer 40,000 game Space Hulk's translation from English to Spanish had a few of these, including "si fire no move" (unknown original line, but presumably "If you fire, you can't move") and "Giro 19, izquierda 1" (turn 19, left 1; "izquierda" is left as in left and right).
  • The Final Fantasy series has had a few corkers:
    • When Final Fantasy IV was translated to the SNES as "Final Fantasy II," the result was full of mangled renderings, including the well-known "You spoony bard!"
    • Final Fantasy V (the PS1 translation) has a character named Faris, who was adopted at a very young age. As it turns out, her real name is Sarissa, and her adoptive name was simply all she could pronounce at the time. The English translator apparently never got the joke and instead went with... "Salsa".
      • It Got Worse. The Wyvern enemy was rendered in said translation as "Y-Burn". Ugh.
      • There was also a squid enemy called "Soccer". People were left wondering what connection this mollusk had to footy until the GBA remake, where the enemy's name was properly transliterated as "Sucker".
    • Final Fantasy VII had its own translation issues the French translation also has some pearls like "I am one of the rightful heirs to this planet", which was better translated by Google than it was in the game itself.
      • The Guard Scorpion is supposed to be a Warmup Boss, with a simple gimmick to show off the active-time battle system; attacking at the wrong time [1] will result in a nasty counterattack. However, a botched translation led to Cloud yelling the exact wrong thing to do, turning the first boss of the game into That One Boss for those who couldn't figure it out.
    • Final Fantasy VII also gives us the classic boss name mistranslation "Safer Sephiroth." It's meant to be "Sefer", which is Hebrew and goes with the Kabbalah reference in Sephiroth's name.
    • Speaking of Final Fantasy VII, the English translation had a minor error in one of Cloud's Limit Break moves. It was supposed to be "Crime Hazard" ("Kuraimu Hazādo" in Japanese), but was mistranslated into English as "Climhazzard".
    • Another Final Fantasy VII example is translating Odin's "Gunguniru" (Gungnir, Odin's spear from mythology) as "Gunge Lance", leaving English players wondering what the hell slime has to do with the attack.
      • Even worse is the German version, which was obviously translated from the English one. Why? Because every other English line is left untranslated. And no, it's not a case of Gratuitous English, when random lines like "He's scary!" or "I'm so nervous" suddenly appear in an all-German text for no reason. When Yuffie asks Cloud to give her all the Materia after they have defeated Sephiroth, the translators apparently decided to take a break in the middle of their work and ended up forgetting to finish the translation of one textbox which resulted in the (in German communities often quoted and by now legendary) sentence "It's all in there, read it sorgfältig durch" (read it carefully). This made the quote unintentionally comical and people still refer to it as a prime example of bad translations. Also, some attack and weapon names were mistranslated horribly. For example, "Drain" became "Rohr," which means "sewer-pipe" instead of "to drain of something" and Materia and spell names often got varying translations in different places of the game. It was often hard to make out what you actually just equipped.
      • Speaking of Germany in Final Fantasy VII, let's not forget that "Ahriman" was translated as "Allemagne", the french for Germany
      • On top of some very strange... choices, what was especially baffling about the French translation was that there were sometimes missing words or, at the other end of the spectrum, words or entire SENTENCES repeated for no reason.
      • In Spain Ahriman was translated to Alemania, Spanish for Germany. Also, the translators managed to call Aeris both a woman and a man in the very same dialog box, multiple times (and did that to Tifa and Jesse, and probably any female character, too). And Allévoy, a typo of Allá voy (Here I come) is an actual meme. Sífilo is a meme too, it's one of many typos of Sephiroth/Sefirot that happens to look (and sound) very similar to syphilis. Also, when you talk with a child in Costa del Sol, he says, more or less It hurts when you kick [the ball] with your bare feet in Spanish it got translated to It hurts when you kick me with your bare feet. Yuffie says let's go instead of let go to Don Corneo's henchmen, and the time when she says GROSS-NESS is just untranslated. Oh, and Absorb MP materia, in some games, had the description text: Summons Knights of the Round Table. Spanish translation for FFVII was horribly catastrophic. It could have its own wiki.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics has a notoriously bad translation, with such gems as mistranslating "Fire Breath" as "Fire Bracelet", and being totally inconsistent with name spellings (such as Luveria/Ruvelia).
      • And now you know how the Assassins' "Stop Bracelet" could cause Instant Death.
      • And who could forget "This was the darkened items won't appear"?
      • Thankfully, the PSP port fixed that problem with a brand new translation that actually makes sense (and is in fact pretty cool).
    • Final Fantasy XIV: The out-sourced translators originally screwed up Chocobo. Always written チョコボ/Chocobo, both in Japanese and English, the initial translation of the game instead used 馬鳥, which was subsequently direct-translated to 'Horse-bird'. Even better, fan outcry-spurred change resulted in a global correction to Chocopo. It was fixed (for real) soon after.
    • Final Fantasy IX lost some of its callbacks to previous games through Blind Idiot Translation. Mount Gulug was supposed to be Mount Gurgu, referencing Gurgu Volcano from the first game. Mog's true identity, Madeen was supposed to be Maduin (both are romanized and pronounced the same), referencing the Esper from Final Fantasy VI, and her attack, "Terra Homing", was supposed to be "Terraforming". Other gems include "Maliris" instead of "Marilith" (the proper name of the fiend known as "Kary" in early translations of the first game) and "Rally-ho!" instead of "Lali-ho!" ("Lali-ho!" being the cry of the dwarves in Final Fantasy IV). Freya's long-lost love, Sir Fratley, was possibly meant to be Flatley, a reference to Michael Flatley, an Irish-American step dancer and actor.
      • According to the translators, however, Executive Meddling is the reason for most of these changes, as apparently the players were supposed to figure out the references themselves.
  • Star Ocean the Second Story translates a monster supposed to be named "Scylla" as "Sukula", and at least one or two Tales of... games mistranslate "Stirge", a bat-like enemy, as "Stage".
  • In earlier Tales of games released in North America, "Armet Helm" is mistranslated as "Ahmet Helm."
  • The German translation of the WW 2 shooter Hidden & Dangerous is a hilarious example. The sentences seemed correct at first, mostly as it featured voice-overs, but almost all critical information was wrong. In one mission the player is ordered to destroy "die verbleibenden Panzer" (the remaining tanks), but there are no tanks on the map! Unless, of course, you figure out that tank can also mean an oil tank. Another example is "Bordwaffenbeschussmodus links / rechts" (aircraft weapon firing mode left / right) meaning, yes, "strafe left / right". There is some historical truth to it, but it made it look like your HQ was infiltrated by Dadaists.
    • You are at least introduced to the quality from the beginning - the games loading screen reads "Das Laden, warten bitte" - in English "The Loading, wait please".
    • Along those same lines, there are some out-of-place uses of the word 'Panzer' in Codename: Panzers. Anything that is called a tank is called a Panzer ingame- Russian crewman shout that their Panzer has broken down, while a US unit cries "A Tiger... they have a Tiger Panzer!" Obviously due to the use of Panzer (short for Panzerkampfwagen, "armour-battle-vehicle") meaning both tank in German, and being the designation for their AFV's in WW 2 (at least until the Panther, which was officially designated the Panzerkampfwagen V until Adolf Hitler himself decreed in 1944 that it shouldn't be)
  • The English version of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn manages to translate a use of "Fire Emblem" in game as "heart of fire", yes they mistranslated the titular MacGuffin while getting it right in the title. Yes, Heart of Fire is a valid translation otherwise, but come on, how do you do that...
    • In the same game, the Four Riders (a title granted to the four highest ranking generals) of Daein are mistranslated as the Four Horsemen in The Black Knight's profile. Again, a valid translation (and if used consistently, would have been better) but it's quite the mistake.
    • Muarim's profile is for some reason the same as Mist's. Yes, so Muarim is now a member of the Greil mercenaries and Ike's sister.
    • The opening text of the first Fire Emblem game: "At first, there are dark dragon, Falchion, and...Fire Emblem"
  • The Italian version of the adventure game "Cruise for a Corpse". Delphin Software (which was a french company) didn't hire professional translators and handled translation by itself - the results have to be seen to be believed. For instance, the title was translated as "Crociata per un cadavere", which means "CRUSADE (no, i'm not joking) for a corpse", with "for" meaning "in favor of"! Add to that dialogue translations ranging from hilariously bad to completely nonsensical and you've got one hell of an unplayable game version - most of the time you can hardly understand what people are telling you.
  • Happens many, many times when translating games to Italian. For instance, in Shogo: Mobile Armor Division they translated "intelligence", as in "military intelligence", as "intelligenza", which means "intelligence" as in "intelligence quotient".
  • The publisher company Natsume couldn't decide on a romanization for its own name at first: it used the Kunrei-shiki romanization "Natume" in Harvest Moon 64's title screen, not to mention the prominent message telling you to "Push the Start".
    • They also spelled "sofa" as "Sopha", "flour" as "Flower", and stone as "Sone" inFriends of Mineral Town.
    • That's more the territory of really bad spelling than really bad translation, though. (Incidentally, Natsume is horrible about that in general - Problems with its/it's/its', their/there, and commas are to be expected in all things Harvest Moon.)
    • They just plain forgot in one instance with Takakura in Friends of Mineral Town; he still speaks Japanese if you attempt to speak to him often enough as he picks up shipped items.
      • Worse than that is the local priest, Carter. At one point in the game you can ask several characters to pick grapes with you. If you ask Carter, he refuses. In German. Although he says: "A part-time job in the vinyard sounds like lots of fun." (Lacking the letters ö and ß and replacing them with o and b.)
    • "g Rod "hing RodCopper Fishin For Fishing" - The description for the fishing rod.
    • '"A Wonderful Life and its related games have numerous errors. Their translation of the Special Edition was especially bad, with Lumina being referred to as Muffy on a few occasions.
    • Their translation of River King Mystic Valley is... special. A lot of the characters in it are from Japanese folklore and mythology... but Natsume was apparently totally oblivious to this. If the manual is anything to go by, you get Tenuki instead of Tanuki, Arai Adzuki instead of A(d)zuki-Arai (They apparently mistook it for a personal name, rather than the name of the type of creature he is, and reversed it into "Western order"), the kamaitachi (literaly "Scythe Weasel") simply as "Weasel", Kapa instead of Kappa (yes, it does make a difference), and Nurikabe as "Plaster Wall" (An accurate literal translation, but sounds ridiculous as a name for a creature in English).
    • After you've completed a mini game you get a "CLEAR!" message in big letters (as in "FINISHED!"). In the German version it says "LÖSCHEN!" (as in "DELETED!"). (And this isn't Lumines.)
  • In the game Graffiti Kingdom, there are several small mistakes in grammar. "It is time for tea almost" instead of "It is almost time for tea", and such things like that.
  • The hentai game Neko Kawaigari, which deals with terminally ill cat girls, has music with terribly mangled English lyrics. This is especially poignant in the ending tune, which is supposed to be very sad, but totally misses its mark.
    • You have to admit that the phrase "I love you from cradle to flatline" is suitably touching, grammar aside.
    • There's a kind of ironic symmetry in the fact that the very title of the above-linked YouTube video includes a horribly basic mangling of the name of the game itself (just because "kawaii" is the only Japanese word you know doesn't mean you have to shoehorn it in where it isn't necessary...) Might that be a Blind Idiot Transliteration?
  • In the hentai game Divi Dead, when confronted by an obnoxiously smug character at one point, the protagonist thinks "What a fart-blasting scrotum this guy is!"
  • Early released games of the European-based visual novel Publisher MangaGamer is full of this. It's so bad that one of their games, namely Edelweiss had to be re-released with only minor grammar fixes. Not that it does any help, because the game is still gibberish after that. But on the other hand, when you actually figured out some lines, it's worth some good laughs.
    • Edelweiss is also notable for not translating significant portions of dialogue, presumably because they found it too complicated, and not germane to the "sex". Anytime when the protagonist is saying, "I don't know what he's saying..." -- it's perfectly understandable, if complicated Japanese.
    • They tried to bribe their only available English-speaking contact, to retranslate/spellcheck. He hasn't gotten back to them yet.
      • They eventually [i]did[/i] do a full retranslation of the game, released as a free patch and done by a native English-speaker.
    • As admitted in a later interview, early games were translated in-house by Japanese employees (not translators) whose grip of English was... questionable, and there was no script editing done after that. This becomes jarringly obvious in Edelweiss where you can notice that different routes were translated by different people with different level of English proficiency, leading to a single term (Homunculus) being translated/transliterated differently in every route.
    • "Either they mustervate or they become lilly"
    • Admittedly, among their 3 opening titles, there is one well-translated game but at the same time, it was the worst game of them, content-wise. It still didn't do much help.
    • Speaking of Manga Gamer, another of their game, Kira Kira got pretty close to this, being translated too literally and resulting in a unnecessarily long wordy script. The other English version on iPhone? Even worse.
  • In Space Colony, among the player's many tasks is mining for silicon (in German: "Silizium") to produce computer chips. German players, however, had to mine "Silikon" (silicone). Admittedly a very deceptive false friend, but come on...
  • The Game Boy Advance dungeon crawler Dokapon: Monster Hunter has a hilariously awful translation--it seems more like a corny fan-made effort than a genuine translation. "Gems" include: "Fire breathed practice alcoholism", "Cat to hold is special skill," and "Make some status effect happen."
  • Deliberately pointed out by the translators of Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. "Welcome to the town of Whitesnow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow. * Note: this is what happens when you do a direct translation."
  • Mondo Medicals has many deliberate examples of Engrish, or at least very awkward English. "CANCER?! DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT A CANCER IS?! CANCER IS A SMALL PIECE OF DEATH THAT SLOWLY TAKES OVER A BODY!"
    • Every Cactus game has this. It was quite a surprise to find out his English is rather good when conversing normally.
  • Every single Resident Evil game has English audio-- even in the Japanese releases. The very first Resident Evil was dubbed by native English speaking voice actors, but overseen by a Japanese director. Thus you get such Good Bad Translation lines as 'This hall is dangerous! There are terrible demons! Ouch!' (and yes, he does say the word 'ouch').
    • "I'm going back to the pharmaceutical room." She actually means the chemical room where you mix the V-Jolt, not the medical room in the main house.
    • "You, the master of unlocking..." "You were almost a Jill sandwich!".
      • Most of these phrases were fixed in the Gamecube remake "That was a close one. A second late, and you would have fit nicely into a sandwich."
    • " The STARS are doomed! Someone is a traitor!" (when playing as Jill) "Double-crosser!" (when playing as Chris)
    • "We need to blow this place up. I'm going to set off the triggering system for a bomb." (I'm going to activate the Self-Destruct Mechanism.) Who set up us the bomb?
    • And the Grenade Launcher is called a "Bazooka" in the original.
    • RE 2 has pretty bad translations in parts too:
      • "We lost contact with them over ten days ago. Chris, Jill, Barry, every last STARS team member has disappeared. We should have listened to them." Of course, their communication was cut off due to the Zombie Apocalypse.
      • "You think we can get upstairs (to the other side) through this shaft(hole)?"
      • "I cleared the wreckage (debris) that was blocking the corridor."
      • "Only there's a wrecked car barring the entrance". It's a van, not a car, and although it blocks the door, it's not "wrecked".
      • "We now have access to the back of the parking lot (the back of the basement, that is)."
      • "Her forehead's burning up (she's got a fever). I've got to hurry before the embryos (there's only one embryo actually) pupate (metamorphoses)."
      • "I heard {my dad} call my name." But wasn't he already mutated? I.e. What Happened To Daddy? Plot hole?
      • "Did your mom give you something called 'G Virus'?" Sounds like "did she infect/inject you with it"? Wait, actually, it sounds more like "did she give you chlamydia?" Squicky.
      • "We've finally arrived. There must be something hidden here." Actually, they haven't quite arrived at the laboratory yet.
      • "We're inside Umbrella's secret lab." Underground research facility, not a lab itself.
      • "Someone tried to kill me": actually she was trying to kill Ada and Leon took the bullet. "Ada... went after the sniper," i.e., the gunman.
      • Claire to Sherry in the 2nd scenario ending: "You look terrible."
    • Even Code Veronica didn't have the best translation.
      • A couple of the most narm worthy quotes from the game make an appearence in Dead Rising, specifically one of the stores. Reading the description you'd have to wonder if Capcom did the bad acting on purpose.
    • The English version of Resident Evil Archives, a companion book to the first five games in the main series, suffers from several translation mistakes, as well as an overall poor attempt at localizing the book's content. One section of the book replaces all instances of the word "biohazard" with "Resident Evil", even when the context doesn't warrant it, giving us such gems like the "Umbrella Resident Evil Countermeasure Service" and "a Resident Evil outbreak has been detected".
    • RE 3 was even more gratuitous: "It is not enough to make the device to work". "Mikhail appears to be in pain and suffering". "A dried up pumpkins are placed here".
  • The disclaimer, originally from the Bullet Hell shooter Do Don Pachi, shown on Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: "Violator and subject to severe penalties will be prosecutedt to the full extent of the jam."("jam" is "law" with the first and last letters inverted)
    • The boss warning sign from the first game says: "This is not similation. Get ready to destoroy the enemy. Target for the weak points of (the) fuckin' machine. Do your best you have ever done."
  • The H-game Phoenix Drive was translated by the developers themselves. Needless to say, his alibi collapses with this evidence product!
    • I will beat a rod until...a tank empties!
    • Oh SNAP! I do not hear such a truth...?
    • Nice bust, Maya! Cool beans!
    • The weird thing is, von Karma uses correct English while everyone else is mangled.
      • Proving that even in a bad H game, a Von Karma is still (loosely) perfect.
  • From the epilogue of the Original R-Type: "THE EVIL BYDO EMPIRE WAS ANNIHILATED TO NEVER SCARE PEOPLE AGAIN." Luckily R-Type II and newer are much better about this.
    • R-Type II? "THE BYDO EMPIRE WHICE WAS ATTEMPTING TO EXPAND ITS TERRITORY..." and "MANY PLANETS WERE INVADED BY THE EVIL EMPIRE AND TURNED INTO DEATH STARS..." say otherwise.
    • Oh, and the original's ending text also called the Bydo the Byde, even though the title screen got the name right.
  • The rendering of "Shiroma" and "Kuroma" from the Final Fantasy side-games as "Shirma" and "Croma" in post-merger translations. These are technically acceptable romanizations, but result from the translator apparently being completely oblivious to the Punny Name nature of the original names -- it would make more sense to change the names entirely to something that has a similar joke... or, failing that, to romanize them directly to maintain the original joke for people who would still get it.
    • The names are not only punny, they are also meaningful: "Shiromadoushi" means "White Mage" and "Kuromadoushi" means "Black Mage": Exactly what those two are. Giving them Eight Bit Theater -esque names would probably have been more appropriate for the translation.
  • The first Suikoden game has a pretty notable bit of Engrish:

Mathiu: All this violence in front of a children!

    • It also almost seems to like referring to Mathiu, your strategist, as a surgeon or doctor.
      • Odessa referring to her uncle, Leon, as her father.
    • The ending theme is worse: it's supposed to be in Portuguese, but the guy who translated it apparently didn't actually know the language, so it ended up as gibberish that just sounds like Portuguese.
  • Suikoden II is full of these as well, with plenty of name inconsistencies such as Bright Shield Rune/Shining Shield Rune, Black Sword Rune/Black Blade Rune, Jilia/Jilian Blight, Han/Hal Cunningham, etc.
    • Untranslated NPC dialogue and enemy names.
    • Your best friend's name was constantly flip-flopping between Joey/Joei/Jowy/Jowi. Let's just call him Joe.
      • And the "honking" and "talking" cats. (The former was supposed to be hissing, the latter meowing.)
        • The talking cat notably spawned a crack theory about it being the reincarnation of Teo Mcdohl due to it saying "So...nya" rather than "N...nya," or "Mr...mrow."
  • The Polish translation of The Orange Box (Half Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2) was obviously done by someone who never played or even seen the games. How else would you explain such bloopers as referring to Portal's female protagonist, Chell, as male throughout the whole game; or translating "[security] breach" as "a cave"; or translating "breach of internal base defenses" (that is, enemies getting past your defenses) as "resistance of the internal base defenses" (that is, your own defenses turning on you). In fact, if you don't know English, then playing with Polish subtitles will leave you completely confused.
    • It's especially tragic to see Portal's trademark dark humor and creepiness completely ruined, because most of the lines in the game are mangled beyond recognition. [2]
    • This sadly seems to be a common feature in Polish games. The Polish version of Beyond Good and Evil features the English voice track, and apparently translates the English idioms used in the game very... er, literally. "This button has no fruit juice."
    • The Polish version of Scrapland is just as atrocious. Translating "They're engaged" as "Everyone is busy" (original voiceover says "They're engaged", referring to a female robot and the Big Bad, Polish subtitles say "Everyone is busy" completely out of the ass) made me nearly catatonic for a couple of hours. More confusing is translating "Stapler" (a type of robot) as "Stapler" through all of the game with an exception of a STORY MISSION OBJECTIVE, where it's translated as "OfficeBot" (Biuras), very similar to the Polish name of "Messenger" (another type of robot).
    • Worse yet, otherwise acceptable translation of Fallout 3 contains a really bad pun, changing the name of villain AntAgonizer into what can be most closely re-translated as "Entomology McAnt" (although translating the nickname "Three Dog" literally is a close second). Curiously, most failed translations come from one and the same distributor.
      • Oh, and "Lincoln's Repeater" was translated as "Lincoln's Semi-Automatic Rifle". If you know at least a bit about guns you'll rage.
    • Polish translation of Jagged Alliance 2, while being mediocre overall, contains some really idiotic translations, like the phrase "I could use a hand here" being translated literally (hand as body part, not "help") and Wolf's quote "Stay alert, they'll probably pop out the moment we drop our guard" being turned into "Stay alert, they'll probably jump out when we take out the guards" in the subtitles (only text was translated, as opposed to the expansion pack...).
  • Chaos Wars, a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between several RPG series (And shooter series Gungrave for spice), was localized by O3 Entertainment. Leaving aside its bad voice acting, the translation itself was extremely poor. Shadow Hearts Smug Snake Nicholi got his name translated as "Nicole", every single "Breath" attack was translated as "Bless" (so you'd better watch out when that red dragon uses its Fire Bless on you) and- most glaringly- they translated the game title "Rebirth Moon" as "Reverse Moon" even though an English logo sits right below where they wrote this.
    • There are many who argue for literal Russian transliteration, arguing about "Nikolai" versus "Nicholi". "Nicole", however, is hilarious.
    • They also quite obviously never even glanced at the official translations of the games they take characters of; they render the Shadow Hearts main known in the US as "Yuri" as "Uru" instead, and also render the "Hiyoko Bug" as a "Chick Bug" -- although this is an accurate translation of Hiyoko, the Generation of Chaos and Spectral series games translated by NIS America and Atlus USA have always just left it as Hiyoko.
      • The Yuri to Uru thing is at least justified, since Yuri's Japanese name is URUMNAF, of which Uru is a shortening. The rest, though...
        • They were probably going for Ulmanov/Urmanov, which is a legitimate Russian name (a surname actually), if kind of obscure.
    • Furthermore, at least some of these changes were unavoidable, as they would have needed to buy the rights to use the translated terms from the respective US companies.
  • Speaking of Shadow Hearts, the third installment, From the New World, features several enemies lifted directly (though mostly In Name Only) from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently the game's Lovecraft Lite atmosphere and the presence of Lovecraft himself as a character weren't enough to make the translators double-check a few of them. Sure, it's easy enough to mistranslate "byakee" as "byarkee," but when Shub Niggurath is translated as "Jeb Niglas", anyone familiar with the source material can't help but Face Palm.
  • Persona, again. Some of the name changes of the Personae and demons in the game were a result of this -- they just directly romanized or approximately romanized the name of the Demon/Persona, without bothering to check if it was referencing anything -- which, this being a Shin Megami Tensei spinoff, it was virtually every time. Among others, this leads to Armati becoming Almighty, Scylla becoming Sucula, and at the "what were they thinking?" end, Skuld becoming Skragg.
    • This was back when Atlus was entertaining the idea of marketing the Shin Megami Tensei franchise in the United States as the heavily-Americanized Revelations series. Only two games were released with the Revelations label (Persona and Last Bible, a.k.a. Revelations: The Demon Slayer) before it was buried; Persona 2: Eternal Punishment hit the United States several years later with a much better-researched translation and no Revelations title in sight, although it unfortunately still has several Shout Outs to the first game's infamous localization for the sake of continuity. Apart from a few flubs identifying the Ssu-Ling and the occasional truncation for screen space, Atlus' subsequent Shin Megami Tensei releases can probably be used as a mythology primer.
      • That's not to say Eternal Punishment is without it's flubs. It has occasional trouble with honorifics, as few English-speaking players were expected to understand them in 2000. This is most obvious when characters refer to the protagonist of Innocent Sin as "Upperclassman Tatsuya", the closest English translation of the term "Tatsuya-Sempai". More recent games (particular Persona 4) tend to avoid this.
  • The So Bad It's Good Spanish ROM hack "Pokémon Quartz" has plenty of these.

"Argh! Fucking kid! You send my plan down to the WC!"

  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow translated "Rubicante" as the unintentially amusing "Lubicant", and "Scarmiglione" became "Skull Millione" - take that, Dante. Likewise, an excellent way to annoy anyone with a passing familiarity with Hindu mythology is to refer, as they did, to a certain bloodthirsty goddess as "Curly".
    • The English translation of The Magic of Scheherezade also calls Kali, "Curly". Among other misnames.
    • Castlevania 3's translation to Japanese and back mangled "Fernandez" into "Belnades."
    • A significant portion of Castlevania 2's dialogue was assumed to be this; as it turns out, they're supposed to be lying (or at least misleading)
    • An interesting subversion. The beginning of Symphony of the Night is called "Final Stage: Bloodlines". Most players assumed it meant the Genesis game, Castlevania Bloodlines. What it actually is, though, is the name of the final stage from Rondo of Blood.
  • The English release of Zoids Saga 2 (As Zoids Legacy) was about as blind idiot as it comes. Not just did it freely mix the names from the English dubs of the Zoids anime with their Japanese originals (So you had the American "Leena" alongside the Japanese "Ballard") but it was full of pure nonsense translations. For example, the description of the Gator Zoid read 'Deform for recon'. More interestingly, the Merda Zoid (One of many in the game not released in the US, and it had about four or five possible Romanizations) was renamed "Hellrunner", the name it was released under in the UK... in the 80s. To make the whole thing even more confusing, one of the lead translators on the staff was an active member of the Zoids fan community.
  • The fourth game in the Mega Man Battle Network series introduces a class of bad guys that should have been translated as HeelNavi... instead the player was faced with HealNavis. This was especially funny because unlike the original name, which would've been Exactly What It Says on the Tin, the name was in no way appropriate to their appearance; HealNavis are big bruisers with spiky armor. Beware the medics... =]
    • From the same game, the infamous line "What a polite young man she was." I mean, we know Ran looks absurdly androgynous, but come on.
      • Megaman, is the jack out now!
      • There are so many electronic store!
      • Leg's go, Megaman!
      • Want to saver you progress?
    • The most hilarious example, however, would be the 100% completion screen, which congratulates the player for clearing EXE 4 instead of BN 4.
    • And the fifth game, while not as bad, had some rather amusing bits, such as Lan asking Mister Famous "What am I, Mister Famous, doing here?"
      • The DS version of the fifth game is even worse than the GBA version (somehow). With the chip trader offerring to "Bigin Trading", and lines like "Be areful Lan." and "I'm on flames!"
    • Let us not forget the infamous "Load Chaud" from the first game.
    • There are also amusing inconsistencies with virus names; the most glaring of these is the Metool virus being labelled as "Mettaur".
    • Megaman Network Transmission, Gamecube adaptation of the Battle Network series, has a few of these. Most notably, "the professor is now cooling his heals in jail"
  • A pirate translation in Russian of Heroes of Might and Magic IV had one distinctive mistake in translation: all of the the buttons labeled "Back", instead of being translated as in "Go Back" ("nazad") were translated like the part of the body ("spina"). They Just Didn't Care, how else to describe it?
    • Also, one pirate translation in Russian of Heroes of Might and Magic V: Hammer's of Fate was made with autotranslator, which led to some hilarious phrases, for example, original phrase "Give us the child and surrender" became "Daite nam rebenka i sdachu", which means "Give us the child and a change". That is, like the bought a child in a shop.
    • There was a particularly bizarre (and hilarious) Russian translation of Empire Earth II. "Composite bowmen"="complicated men of bowing". A Korean faction named "Chou"? "A tube made out of paste" (presumably connected to Choux pastry?).
  • A Russian translation of Halo: Combat Evolved left all of the voice-overs alone, but replaced all the text. It seems that it was done by either a computer, or someone who has no idea what they are doing. The first mission's objective of "Find Captain Keyes" became "Find the Captain's keys".
  • Legend of Dragoon had an amusing example. Since the characters shout out their attack names, the incredibly literal "Gust of Wind Dance" (suppposed to be "Gale Dance") just becomes Narmtastic.
    • Heck, the whole game was filled with moments like this. Particularly bad during cutscenes that are supposed to be serious.
    • The strange thing about the game's translation is its unevenness. It starts out fairly decent (only a bit below the level of, say, Final Fantasy VII) but seems to get worse as the game goes on. Some scenes are positively tear-jerking, only to be followed by laugh-out-loud terrible comments on the same event.
  • From the original Dragon Quest Monsters game:

Terry looked in front. There are some yummy food.

"The winner of the year was Hesperia Gales. In the final 30 seconds, Henry G trashed out from fieldout!"

    • This game was full of it. "It is a command which arose from the basis of a program." "The basis of a program, are you kidding?!"
  • The original Wild ARMs game had a pretty bad translation, with gems such as "Ray Line" instead of "Ley Line." Fortunately, they fixed it in the remake, although the remake's translation is widely to be considered just as bad.
    • All of Liz and Ard's dialogue in Wild ARMs 2.
      • Liz and Ard's ridiculous dialogue was clearly intentional, as they happen to be a pair of Cloudcuckoolander aliens. The rest of the script, though, has no such excuse - the translators just weren't very good.
      • That does not explain why everyone else's dialogue breaks when they are around. My guess is that Liz originally spoke in a very frilly, archaeic dialect of Japanese and the others (or at least, Ashley) spoke to him in the same dialect in turn. There are a whole bunch of puns in there that completely evaded the translators and ended with gems like "I don't care if it is poetry or the Emperor of Death. I'm in a hurry!". Yeah.
  • The Italian version of Zoocube translated the word "ostrich" as "ostrica". "Ostrica" is Italian for "oyster", a correct translation would be "struzzo".
  • Mario is not immune. A great many of the English item names show that Square's publication arm utterly failed to do any research when localizing Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. To wit, the "Noknok Shell", a familiar green bouncy turtle shell: "Nokonoko" is the Japanese name for the race known in the West as the Koopas.
    • In addition, the Boo enemies you first find in the sewers are just ordinary Boos ("Teresa"), yet they're called "The Big Boo" in the English translation. (Big Boo in Japanese is "Atomic Teresa".)
    • Super Mario 64 DS has an overall okay English translation... except from Bowser's final speech(s) (both before and after getting One Hundred Percent Completion) and the message you get after collecting one of the castle's secret stars:

Wow! Another Power Star! You're getting stronger from the power of the castle.

    • Also, the Shroom Ridge track Mario Kart DS's kiosk prototype contains trucks with the word "FLESH" (fresh) labeled on the side. This was fixed for the final version, where they now properly say "FRESH".
  • In the English version of German RPG Gothic, a certain type of health-restoring berry is labelled 'Blueberries'. They're red.
  • In order to sucker people into thinking it was an actual Pokémon game (the gameplay of the original game is a bit similar in that respect), someone - probably a Chinese bootlegger - created a pirated version of Keitai Denjuu Telefang in which the game (besides being bugged up the ASS) is translated into English. If you can call it English, at least:

"Some points of X lost!"
"I want to somewhere by the way and will return!"

    • This one is famous. You want an example? The water world is called Alice.
  • There's a similarly bad one in the German Pokémon game translations: the move "Pound" is translated as "Pfund" (the currency or weight). While playing the games, I kept thinking my Pokémon were attacking with coinage. Took me years to work it out.[3]
    • The attack Judgement was translated in Germany to "Urteilskraft" Either meaning "power of judgement" or "reasoning powers". Would have avoided the confusion when they had chosen "Urteil" (literal translation of judgement).
    • The ability 'Trace' is translated as 'Fährte' as in traces left by animals, traces of blood, what have you. Yet it copies the opponent's ability. They translated the description correctly. The translator(s) might (not) have wondered why the ability and its description do not match.
    • In Spanish translation: the hooked [name of Pokémon] (when you fish) was translated to el malvado [name of Pokémon], which means the evil [name of Pokémon] (hooked, yeah, but not like that). And the move Counter is translated as contador, which is, in fact, a counter, one which counts things.
    • Also in Spanish, the move Return (as in "give something in return") was translated as Retroceso (something like step back or rewind). Retorno could have been a better translation.
    • The English translation itself had some problems with the attack 'Splash', which originally meant something closer to 'Hop'. In the original games, this wasn't any big deal (the only thing that could learn the move was the fish Pokemon Magikarp), but cue confusion in generation 2 when Hoppip got the move despite no apparent connection to water.
    • The English translation also had problems with attacks that were actually in English in the first place: for example, 'Speed Star' was translated as Swift, despite the fact that it has stars all over the place, but Sky Attack is also worth mentioning, since due to it being translated the way it was, the user just glows randomly in its first turn. That's because its original name was 'God Bird'.
      • Likewise, the 3D games and the anime caused some disconnect between what the attack looked like and what the not-entirely-accurate English translation called it. Rain Dance is never going to be portrayed as a dance because its original name just meant "summon rain", and Aerial Ace was named after the famous sword strike Swallow Reversal, and is a Flying move Just for Pun, but has nothing to do with flying and is widely available on non-winged Pokémon. Newer games have more closely translated attack names presumably for this reason.
    • Another case of a Chinese bootlegger releasing a pirated game with a questionable English traslation: Pokemon Gold. When the character picked up an item such as a Potion, the text would display "GOLD!DRUG BAG FUCK". I can only surmise the bootlegger was working with an extremely vulgar Japanese-to-English dictionary that gave the translation for the Japanese phrase for "put into" as "fuck".
    • Or it might be the same reason that word shows up in the bootleg subtitles of Revenge of the Sith: the Chinese word for "to do" (干 gàn) is slang for sexual intercourse, just like its English equivalent.
    • The English translation of HeartGold and SoulSilver, while for the most part good, had some lines that were... fairly awkward, to say the least. "And this place that you can have such fun... is called the Battle Frontier!"
  • THIS TROPER HAVE A PILLORY
  • Iron Tank: The Invasion of Normandy for the NES: "SNAKE! Watch out, use radar, gigantic enemy objects ahead". "Found the train firing bullets by radar". "I'm your friend. Stay on the railroad, go straight through the town. The enemy train is there. Shoot it." "Enemy's long range bullets are awesome. Allies are destroyed." "Look out ahead, there is the long range firing bullet. Destroy it immediately. The safety of the back up unit is your goal."
  • Battle Rangers, a.k.a. Bloody Wolf included such gems as:
    • "You! Invaders! Get you the hot bullets of shotgun to die!" (Idiomatic translation: "Intruder! Prepare to eat hot lead!")
    • "Opp! I've got foods! Chuck, chuck..."
    • "I've got medicine! Must be good for wounds!"
    • "Hey! Same words to you!"
    • "Haha. Here's goes bloody sight!"
    • "Come on boy, you've got to be serious!"
    • "You stupid! You die!"
    • "Kuuh! You are the loser!!"
    • "Hugh! Me to lose???"
  • Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 suffers from this is utterly stupid ways. Usually, the Koei franchise features good translations, but whoever translated this game just didn't recognize traditional English phrases.

Cecily: "It looks like we'll make it back safe... how about some toast when we get back home?"
Mission title: "Peace Singing Singstress"
Kamille: "I could be dead by morning. I should have changed my underwear."
Shinn Asuka: "I'm more than a match for these guys! Who's laughing at Shinn now?!"

  • The Samurai Shodown games are full of this. All of the games in the series suffer in some way. One rather unusual example in the second game looks like an exception, when Cham Cham is regarding the SNK Boss right after she's declared her intent to 'eat, eat you all': 'Shit! You really make me mad!'
    • Samurai Shodown IV is always happy to declare "victoly!"
    • The referee's statement after anyone's second fight in 2 is "ki ga warui" (meaning, roughly, "something's not right" or "something strange is happening"). It was translated literally into English, into the immensely quoteworthy "Horrible atmosphere."
  • The Swedish translation of the manual for Super Mario Galaxy translated the word "toad" as "frog". For those not in the know, Mario "toads" are humanoid toadstools. (Though in all fairness, Toad and the toads do always sound like they have a frog in their throat.) It also translated "ray" not as the intended "manta ray", but instead going for "ray" as in "beam".
  • The manual for Bionic Commando. "You can shoot at wide range but reach is shoot (short)". As well as much of the dialog in-game:
    • "So you think you can destroy the main system? You have no chance!"
    • "Maybe we can find good weapon we can use".
    • "Ok, we are going to open the door of the boos's room".
    • "I take this bazooka".
    • "This base will explod in 60 sec".
  • Mystery Quest: "Hao can not swim", showing his Super Drowning Skills.
  • The NES translation of Metal Gear was So Bad It's Good ("The truck have started to move!", "I feel asleep!"), but the English MSX version (official, not a fan translation) a mess. Examples: "Destoroy the ultimate weapon, Metal Gear", "I goofed! The lorry started to move!", etc.

AVGN: Man, these translations suck. Couldn't they just get anyone to proofread this shitload of fuck?

    • Snake's Revenge, the non-canonical NES sequel to the first Metal Gear, has quite a bad translation for a game supposedly made for the American market in mind. One instance has a three-man sub-boss team telling Snake that they've prepared "three graves" for him, while another instance has a dying ally telling Snake that they have "found out that Jennifer is a spy" (though its obvious what he meant was that Jennifer was an inside agent whose cover was just blown, the line seems to imply that she was actually a spy working for the enemy when that's not even the case at all). One plot twist involves another of Snake's allies being an enemy spy in disguise, but it's easy to see it coming when he gives such cleverly crafted misdirections like "there are no enemies in that car" and "there are no traps in that car".
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was generally really well handled, but the most Egregious mistake is the parrot chanting the horoscope 'Venus in Cancer'. The original line was something like 'The Venusian crab!' (a reference to the Venusian from It Conquered the World), and was supposed to cast Emma as a b-movie geek (in contrast to her brother's anime Otakudom). Makes even less sense when in Metal Gear Solid 3, Para-Medic jokes that the mask makes Snake look like a Venusian - "not the crab kind, the other kind".
    • Metal Gear Solid featured a similar mistake: When calling Otacon while fighting REX, Otacon will give some history on some of its weapons, including the railgun. During his explaination of the rail gun, he mentions that it was created by a joint venture between Arms Tech Incorporated and Rivermore National Labs. The Japanese version actually referred to the second group as Livermore National Labs, as in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as in the weapons research and development lab in Livermore, California. This issue was corrected in the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database.
      • This is further confirmed by the mention of the Nova Laser project, which was based at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Although a small translation glitch shows up in the mention of a 'NIF laser'. NIF stands for National Ignition Facility (which is on site at Lawrence Livermore), which essentially means 'the place where the government blows stuff up for science'. Sometimes lasers are involved, but there is no single project known as the 'NIF laser'.
  • Breath of Fire II has an infamously bad translation, even for Capcom.
    • It should also be noted that absolutely nothing was changed in the GBA port. Even one instance where a regular party member's name was replaced with a placeholder flag.
      • The GBA remake's translation is actually even worse. Would you trust "The Destined Child" vs. "The Fatal Child?"
    • The translation of the first game, while not as bad, is not good in any sense of the word. Item and spell names are particularly fun due to a character restriction leading to gems like "Protn A", "Mrbl5" and "Pararai" (which itself is a mistranslation, clearly meant to be "paraly", being a paralyze spell and all)
  • The English bootleg translation of the arcade version of Wonder Boy in Monster Land probably has a monopoly on this.
    • The name of "Excalibur" is actually spelled out in English in an on-screen graphic. The translators still managed to misspell it in the dialogue as "Axecaliva".
    • With such "gems" as "DEATH god has key to neighbor," one wonders what the hell they were on.
  • The X-Men arcade Beat'Em Up notoriously has Magneto unleash a sneak attack on the players while proclaiming "X-Men - WELCOME TO DIE!"
    • Which Deadpool, in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, actually adopts into his repertoire, just as "Magneto! Welcome to die!". Hopefully Konami will forgive Capcom for this...
    • Let's not forget Professor X's sage advice. Right before the final boss fight (after defeating a Magneto imposter), he proclaims: "Alas, that was Mystique, not Magneto! Magneto is in another place! Go, X-Men!" Especially odd when you realize "another place" means "this door, right here."
    • The Final Boss fight is a continuous stream of this sort of dialogue, from "I am Magneto, master of magnet!" to "KILL YOU!" Most definitely worth a quarter or ten.
  • The popular song Airman ga Taosenai translates as "I Can't Beat Airman." Unforunately, thanks to a blind idiot translation, many YouTubers vehemently insist that it's "Airman will not be defeated." The reason is that "taosenai" is, in this case, clearly meant to be the negative potential conjugation of "defeat" (i.e. "cannot defeat"), but can also be the negative passive conjugation (i.e. "is not defeated"). Both make grammatical sense, but the former describes what the frikkin' song is about.
  • Castle Shikigami 2 is terrible about this. Even though you can still enjoy the game without understanding anything that is being said, backstory and references to the prequel are impossible to understand because of the vague translations. There are several characters whose stories are so badly translated that you have no idea why they're even in the story (even the next to final boss has a backstory that makes almost no sense due to the translation). And then there's the ingame dialog. Keep in mind this isn't even some of the worst dialog in the game.
  • Valkyrie Profile has a pretty decent translation, possibly because the English voice cast needed something intelligible. But the message the game gives you when it's time to unleash your Limit Break is a real howler: "Technical arts energy charged, PURIFY WEIRD SOUL! Hurry up push button! Step on it!"
    • Interestingly, the word weird is derived from an ancient Nordic word, meaning something similar to fate. It may be a coincidence, but for a game so heavily inspired by Nordic myths to use the word weird like that, it might actually mean something. Of course, it would still be something of a mangled sentence.
    • Valkyrie Profile 2 has its own example of this trope in the move "Nibelung Valesti". It sounds cool and all, but the move was actually supposed to be Nibelung Velocity. "Valesti", incidentally, is the Italian second person singular past historic form of "valere", meaning "to be worth", so "Nibelung Valesti" translates roughly as "You were worth of the Nibelungen".
      • This mistake originates in the original, and they were more or less required to keep it to maintain consistency.
  • GHOST Squad has an example that become a short-lived meme on its board on GameFAQs:

"The mine will explode when the time becomes 0!"

  • Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune. Dear God, almost every line that is longer than 3 words is wonkily translated. In fact, there are a few instances where not only is the translation is wrong, but the formatting is wrong. On one stage, there are 2 lines, both of which are very long and don't have linebreaks, causing each line to go all the way across and off the screen.
  • World in Conflict. The second screenshot is obviously supposed to be HUD of a soviet copter. The text in the right column is: "Method: seedpod of a weapon; auto piece of artillery; Sabo(?); ? of kidnaping". No wonder it was posted in LJ community dedicated to "Fake Russian" trope.
    • I imagine they were aiming for a weapon selection menu: "rocket pod," "autocannon" and "kinetic sabot." They missed by several miles.
  • "Conglaturation!".
    • "and prooved the justice of our culture. Now go and rest our heroes."
  • The infamous Dr. Light/Right and Crash/Clash Man (and C r/l ash Bombs) mixups in Mega Man. The first of each pair is considered correct.
    • Actually, in the latter case, neither is correct. It's supposed to be Crush Man. (Not that ANY of the possible permutations of the name make sense for a guy who shoots tack mines...)
    • This is actually Lampshaded in Mega Man Battle Network, where Lan's grandfather is named Tadashi Hikari--which is Japanese for "Right Light".
    • One of the manuals for a Mega Man game even used the translation Dr. Wright, which really would make the most English sense.
  • The Navi Mode tips in Anniversary Collection. Interestingly, there's an It Was His Sled moment too, as Protoman is the tip-giver in Mega Man 3, despite the fact that you're not supposed to know about him yet.
    • Proto Man shows up early enough in Mega Man 3. More Egregious is Kalinka being the tip-giver in Mega Man 4, which not only introduces a character that won't appear until the end of the game, but hints in advance that the alleged Big Bad of the game isn't.
  • Mega Man X6 is just full of these: for example, it wants to know if you want to "Overwright" your save...
  • Mega Man X8 had one boss's name written in the manuals and in dialogue as "Gigavolt Man-O-War". On the "boss display" screen when you selected his stage, it displayed the name as "GIGABOLT MAN-O-WAR". Most likely due to the B/V confusion in Japanese transliteration of English words.
  • The manual for Mega Man X Treme 2 seems to misspell the names of the villains and Iris, being translated correctly in the actual game. This isn't as big of a blunder for the villains Gareth (Garess) and Berkana (Belkana) but given that X4 came out several years before this, you would figure they'd know how Iris is spelled. Instead, she's 'Aillis.'
  • The intro to the arcade game Pirates:

"Map of the treasure is in pirates' pie ass power. Help me to find it. It might be dangerous. Be strong and be brave. Good luck."

  • A mistake in the SNES translation of Chrono Trigger has Gaspar saying "One of you is close to someone that needs help. Find this person... fast", which seemed to imply the existence of an additional quest apart from the several he mentioned (most often believed to be one to save Schala); further confusion arises from the fact that this line disappears once you defeat Queen Zeal (and likely all of the other sidequests). In the DS remake, this is corrected to have him tell the player to speak to each of the party members for clues on the quests.
    • As for actual Engrish in Chrono Trigger, Melcior's response to seeing the Rainbow Shell is "This is a very rare!"
  • Lufia & The Fortress of Doom contains several instances of awkward dialogue. Sometimes it's punctuated wrong, sometimes it's gramatically incorrect, but mostly the dialogue is just incoherent and/or random with what's happening in the story.
    • The "Safe Tea Ring".
  • One Final Fantasy X fan, dissatisfied with the English voice dub, was hoping to play a subtitled copy bought on eBay. Instead that person got something else entirely. The "Guado" race is now the "Chubby" race, "Jyscal" is "Jessica," and Walter(Wakka) is a good egg.
    • There's also a surprising amount of Ho Yay in the translation, such as "I feel happy that Walter wants to arouse me".
  • Bad Dudes: "Rampant ninja related crimes these days, White House is not the exception."
  • The copyright disclaimer for the Japanese version of Express Raider says: "If you are playing this outside the country of Japan, YOU ARE ENJOYING IN A PRIME!"(You are involved in a crime)
  • The Spanish translation of Fire Emblem 7 (The first one released outside Japan) has dozens and dozens of typos, though they're all in Support Conversations, Hector's tale and in some houses, implying they did some sort of spellchecking, but only the bare minimum. Most stuff got renamed for no apparent reason, most notable being Lyn's promoted class getting Un-Lord-ified from "Blade Lord" into "Swordmistress" (for no reason. But that wasn't the worst. The worst was turning Fa(e) into a boy and claiming Marquess Darin looked... like House Laus.
    • The later installements got better, but they still have issues: Amelia of Sacred Stones refers to herself as a man when she promotes, two throwable weapons from Path of Rradiance were called "Swordreaver" and "Axereaver", despite that game having no "Reaver" weapons, and no two games on the same system call (Armor) Knights the same thing (Like most other classes, for that matter... They have it worst though, since half the names are dumb).
  • When Disgaea: Hour of Darkness had its DS version released in France, we got a full translation... except that it was the English version almost word for word. Translated with a dictionary, apparently. With pearls like translating "Usagi Drop" as "Rabbit Crap", or failing to see that the Horse Wiener was a Gag Penis and not an actual wiener. Seriously, guys.
    • In the English version of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, a lot of the lower-level swords are called by generic names, such as "katana" or "rapier". But the sai, rather than simply being called a sai, is called a "Rhino" instead.
    • To the DS french version's defense, Wiener in french is an uncommon term for penis.
  • Secret of the Stars had a particularly bad one, such as translating "Kraken" as "Clarken". Some quotes from the game:

"Whew! Studying math gave me a rash."
"What? You're so anything. Go to the circus now."
"I am just your everyday normal cat! Not!"

  • Star Fox Adventures had an acceptable French translation, but two errors stand out for being visible even if you didn't understand English:
    • Early in the game, after Fox falls into some water, a dinosaur greets him with a line whose two only intelligible words are "hot spring". "spring" was translated as if it was the season.
    • Late in the game, a dinosaur offers to take Fox within striking range of some defensive turrets, but since their range is greater than Fox's, asks him to "protect [me] from their fire" and not blindly shoot at them. It was translated as if the turrets were either equipped with flamethrowers, or on fire themselves, I don't really know.
  • Most of the changes to the English script of Knights in The Nightmare are just removal of characters' accents, name changes due to length restrictions or for rank pulling, and the alteration of all text into standard polite English. Some of the translation conventions, however, cross into this territory:
    • The original Japanese script had a female Lance Knight named Meslieness and an NPC poet named Marion. For whatever reason, Meslieness' name was changed to Marion, and Marion's name to Mervyn. Something that might irritate those who preferred the original script perhaps, but nothing catastrophic--except for the fact that in the game and the few translated bonus materials, "Mervyn" was still referred to as "Marion" in many places, causing a lot of confusion.
    • Then there are the item names. Atlus has always shown confusion on how to translate the name of the item ????? ("Kokori no Mi"), which has variably been written as Applecot, Kokorinut, and Applecot Nut; however, it was the "Upola Statue" item which was the most Egregious example in the game--the translation that had stood for the past two entries (and their two remakes) was changed to Upora Statue, evidently out of L/R flip confusion.
    • And... Marietta's signature attack, which in Japanese has always been ?????? (usually Romanized as "Rivellion" by Sting) and has always been translated as "Angelic Thunder" by Atlus, was suddenly changed to Rebellion without explanation.
  • If a Keyboardmania arcade machine detects a problem with the wheel during its power on self-test sequence, it will say "PLEASE WHEEL REPAIR. WE DO THE APOLOGY FOR ANY INCONVENIENT."
  • Polish version of The Return of the King videogame translated the dialogue between Eowyn and the Witch-King this way:

Witch-King: Pathetic female warrior.
Eowyn: I will kill you if you touch him.
Witch-King: Kill me? Fool. No living being can slay me.

Eowyn: I am not male. You look upon a female.

  • Also, Polish translation of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time while being fairly decent, contains one. When the Prince rejects Farah's proposition of covering him, because she could hit him, the dialogue in Polish goes like this:

Farah: I'll cover you.
Prince: Please, don't. Your duty is to hit me.

    • It actually sounds rather close to snark. And this is the Prince.
  • Super Mario Land had this, in that it was pretty much machine translated from the Japanese version. The real reason half of the enemies have strange names such as 'Pakkun Flower'? It's because those are the Japanese versions of the names of enemies such as 'Piranha Plant'. More obvious when you consider the bosses and such like, with names that are very obvious English direct translations of the Japanese like 'Dragonzamasu' and 'Hiyoihoi'. It's also why half the world names lost the meaning in them.
  • In the English version of Ishar 2, the citizens of the main city greet you with "Welcome presumptuous travelers!".
  • The Dutch manual of Gothic 2 translates 'turn undead' as 'ondood worden', which means "become undead". 'Turn undead' is an attack that destroys undead.
    • Doubly stupid because this is obviously the result of translating the (itself faulty) English translation back to Dutch, instead of translating the original German version directly. There's no way you could confuse "Untote zerstören" (destroy undead) with "Untoter werden" (become undead). Triple ridiculous because Dutch and German are so similar and easy to translate into each other.
  • Wolf Team is loaded with this. Even the title screen has it! Enjoy the 5.1 Circle Sound while you use the EM-60, but have to reload four times to prevent overheat from over 200 shooting. Stupid interruption in the supply of ammo. Watch out for the Snake Attack, you never know when a Ghost Wolf will get behind you. They usually try when your Machine Gun is in installation or when you are trying to install plant the bomb.
  • Beatmania IIDX:
    • "The special mission available!"
    • Also, basically every English-language song from Japan
  • The Maru Mari and Varia from Metroid. Maru Mari literally translates as "round ball" or "circle ball", of course this later became Morph Ball. The "Varia" (suit) was originally meant to be called the Barrier Suit. However, the name Varia caught on and has been used ever since...
    • The name "Chozo", the birdman race featured throughout the Metroid series, came from an abbreviation of Choujin no Zou [4] or "birdman statue". Thus, the name originally referred to the bird-like statues that appeared in the games, and not the actual birdman race itself that they represented. When Nintendo Power's Super Metroid tie-in comic gave Samus her origin story, the name "Chozo" was used to refer to the birdman people that raised her and every subsequent game afterward would follow suit. Interestingly, the Chozo statues in Super Metroid were called "Torizou", which is another way of reading the characters for "bird statue" or "Chozo" in Japanese.
  • When a Power Instinct 2 machine firsts boots up

FIRST BOOT UP IS.
FIRST EEP ROM DEFAULT INITIALIZED.

  • The German translation of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is definitely one of the worst commercial English-to-German translations in the last decade. The "Quit" button in the main menue is labeled "Fertig", which means "done" in English. Numerous quest texts aren't even translated at all, the part of the main quest in Kvatch, for example. Some items have horribly crippled names like Schw.Tr.d.Le.En.W, which stands for "Schwacher Trank der Lebensenergie-Wiederherstellung" (Weak Potion of Restoring Life Energy). It was so pathetically bad that Bethesda had to create a separate German patch just to fix the worst of the horrible translation and make the item names comprehensible. Most of the other issues haven't been fixed to this day.
  • Not only the Portuguese in Scribblenauts looks like a mix of Portugal and Brazil Portuguese, they also managed to do this in the pause menu: the restart option became "Tente Sair (Try to Quit).
  • SEED: Rise of Darkness, an iPhone game. Half the place names are wrong on the map graphic, the first jester you meet seems to be named both "Johnny" and "Zani", at the same time, and one NPC seems to be referring to a place that doesn't exist. How do you expect me to get your compass fixed if you want me to go to a nonexistant place?
  • It's not uncommon to play a beat-'em-up or Fighting Game which features a character whose fighting style is listed as "martial arts". Examples include Axel Stone, Cody, Terry Bogard, Ralf and Clark, and Sarah Bryant to name a few. This is because in Japan, the English term "martial arts" is used as a loanword to refer to martial arts of western origin (such as American-style kickboxing or full-contact karate), in contrast to its use as a general term in English. That's why we often get characters whose martial art style is "martial arts".
  • Ace Combat Zero gave us the "Hydrian Line," presumably, given the surrounding Arthurian lore, supposed to be some reference to "Hadrian's Wall."
  • The two games in the Armored Core 4 timeline gave us a huge power generator supposedly called "Megalis." Not "Megalith," then? Equally, Spirit of Motherwill is said to be armed with a "loaded shell cannon."
  • Lux-Pain. The entire game is littered with examples. Most is fairly tame, maybe adding or missing a letter, or changing one. Then at times it simply gets confusing, such as using "he/him" when they should have used "she/her". Or forgetting if it's in Japan or America. Or calling characters by the wrong names (At one point resulting in the player being told he needs to go talk to himself.) And then there's the bizarre word fusions. ("You slunched over and crushed the cake!")
  • While fixed in the USA localisation of Demon's Souls. In the Chinese/English version, while the NPCs and most important information show Surprisingly Good English, some of the flavor text is borderline gibberish (although it's generally comprehensible).
  • The Swedish translation of Dungeon Keeper annoyingly translates "Your minion has fallen in battle" as "Din underhuggare har hamnat i en strid", which actually means "Your minion has ended up in a fight". It also translates the name of the "Mistress of the Dark" character as "Mörkrets älskarinna", which is technically correct... except that "älskarinna" means "mistress" as in "lover", not as in "ruler". (But then, maybe they had a reason.) Also, if you try dropping coins in the temple pools, the original will tell you that "this is not a wishing-well". The Swedish translation hilariously tells you that "this is not a wish for well-being". Add to this that in the manual, the monsters are listed in alphabetic order, except that the translator didn't bother to change them around when the translation meant that their names began with different letters...
  • Alien Soldier's intro is full of this.
    • The PAL release rewrote the intro text, though. Not that it still makes sense... they also removed the "SPEEDSHOCK!" etc. from the main menu, which is just inexcusable.
  • In the Finnish back-of-the-box blurb for Escape from Monkey Island, despite there being a boatload of possible piratey phrases to use in Finnish (for example 'Myrsky ja mylväys', the Finnish version of the German 'Sturm und Drang', meaning 'Storm and Stress'), 'Shiver me timbers' was translated directly as 'Täristele puitani', which sounds more like 'Shake my trees' than anything else.
    • The Spanish version of this game has some translation errors so obvious you have to wonder if they didn't use a translating software once in a while. For instance, in the wooden cane store, if you get near the counter you get a choice to "Ring Bell" to call the manager. The spanish version translates the word "ring" as the jewelry object instead of the verb, so where it should say "Tocar Campana" it says "Anillo Campana" instead, which makes as much sense as replacing "drink water" with "bracelet water".
    • The Curse of Monkey Island makes a similar mistake of replacing a verb with a subject when Guybrush is on the theatre stage and says "What I really want to do is direct". This should be translated as "Lo que realmente quiero hacer es dirigir". Instead it's translated as "Lo que realmente quiero hacer is directo", which actually sounds like "What I really want to do is straight".
  • Ninja Gaiden Arcade is full of Engrish signs and labels such as "IceCeCrem", "Esso Gus", "Caca {Cola}", "Sele"(sale?), "Loin Dry Clehn", "Peps(i)", "Beer Gaden", etc.
  • Ghosts N Goblins: "This story is happy end".
  • Legendary Wings: "The devil is waiting for us in the palace. Rush courageously." "X areas are still to be cleare. Hold out for final victory". "You have saved human race from its extinction. Thank you for playing".
  • In the Spanish version (or at least in the Spanish version) of FIFA 09 they translated belgian club RC Standard de Liège as "RC Normal de Liège". One might think "well, maybe they didn't get the license for that club", but yes, they did. It even has the official club crest and logos.
  • The Phantasy Star games were full of these. A gem from the second comes in Paseo after Nei dies, where talking to an old man results in him telling you: "Brain. This caused the people's mind to weaken. The trap also leads Algo to destruction. I don't know who made the trap, or why. There is a Neisword in the box. When you pick it up, it will rescue you from the evil side."
  • In one of the Russian localizations of the first Half-Life game, chapter name "We've got hostiles" was translated as "We've got hostels".
  • Fallout 2 has quite a good share in French version:
    • "Peut-être penseras-tu à moi" (Yes, they translated the shoutout to the intro of Fallout, with "Maybe by Ink Spots")
    • The Pipe Rifle, wich used a pipe as a cannon, was named "fusil à pipe". "Une pipe" is something you use to smoke tobacco, while the pipe used here is "un tuyau".
  • Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword, in French: A magic sword using a spell of light (lumière in French) was translated as if was itself light (léger in French).
  • The Polish version of SimCity 4: Rush Hour qualifies. Oh, so much. For example, "Free Ride" was translated as "Darmowa Jazda"... "Darmowa" means "free" as in, "for free". Another example, the "abduction" function of the UFO was translated as "obdukcja"... which means "autopsy". And the "chopper" bike in the vehicle selection in "My Sim" mode was translated as "helikopter"... you can guess what that means.
  • Parodied in Vega Strike -- one of random lines for Rlaan when they are angry is:

May you be ravaged by poor Hungarian-Rlaan dictionaries... computer! Reboot translation!

  • The "instructions" for the cheaper Commodore 64 games on tape often consisted of nothing more than "Type LOAD and press Return key." In one instance this got translated into German thus: "Type LADUNG und presse zurück Schlüssel," which contains exactly one correct word.

Type: Not translated. WTF?
LADUNG: They translated the computer command, thus making sure that the instructions can't work at all.
presse: Wrong meaning of "press."
zurück: No. The key has the word "Return" written right on it - so don't translate it!
Schlüssel: Wrong meaning of "key."

  • Taito, on the whole, has been pretty good (even when the translation isn't perfect, it's understandable), but there have been a few howlers. Like the profile for Lick Joe in Violence Fight: "Former professional wrestler. His profession revoked because he killed 13 wrestlers during playing. Although his bodily strength is very strong, his movement is slow." Never mind how they got the idea that "Lick Joe", "Bat Blue", "Lee Chen", "Ron Max", and "Tony Won" were proper names for American underground brawlers. ("Ben Smith" seems passable except that he's supposed to be, y'know an INDIAN.)
  • Final Fight suffered from nonsensical names that were supposed to be something else. In particular, mixups with the katakana for "to" and "do" (exactly the same except for two little marks) and the translator never knowing for sure whether it was supposed to mean "to/do" or "t/d". As a result, we got "Bred" (Bret), "Dug" (Doug), "Andore" (Andre), "Simons" (Simon), "El Gado" (El Gato), "Rolento" (Laurent), and worst of all, "Edi.E" (Eddie). And of course, the SNES-only sequel continued the tradition with "Mic" (Mick), "Eliot" (Elliot), "Jony" (Jonny), "Elick" (Erick), and "Schot" (Scott...whoever came up with that one should be schot). "Rolento" got changed to "Rolent", which of course did not improve matters one tiny bit.
  • Sky Blazer on the Super NES was loaded with WTF-caliber translations, but the one that stands out is that the word "well" was consistently rendered as "tuell". Comes close to qualifying for Translation Train Wreck.
    • The PAL version of the game corrected most of the numerous typos, although the script still ended up being pretty awkward.
  • In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3, you're treated to "SUDDEEN KILL" when you clear a 10 Opponent Outrun with an S. The same mistake is in DX; it was finally fixed in DX Plus.
  • And speaking of Namco, here's the ending text to Dragon Spirit in its entirety: "Zawell's ambition was crushed by the brave attempts of the warrior Amul and bluedragon to rescue princess Alicia from the hands of her captors. The kingdom cloud ultimatery restore peace. People were rejoiced to start from a nightmare, thus celebrating the restoration and jazzing up with joy. The evil perished, and the light came back to the kingdom again, as if celebrating its prosperity and happiness...." And you wonder why it took so long to bring win comments to Tekken...
  • The Hungarian dub of The Witcher completely kills the game's climax with an obviously context-deprived translation. As Geralt is about to use his silver sword to kill de Aldersberg, the villain exclaims "That sword is for monsters!". In the Hungarian version, this is translated to "I use this sword against monsters".
  • Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist in German is a huge mess. One specific example that I can still remember is that "jockstrap" was translated as "Scotsman's suspender."
  • The Ace Attorney games are usually brilliantly translated and take Woolseyism to a new level of awesomeness. In some places, however, stupid mistakes tend to sneak in and in Justice for all The Miracle Never Happen.
    • A random joke in Investigations was, however, rendered somewhat awkward. Examining the side of a building in the fifth case has Kay deliver a line beginning with "Thief Child says:", clearly a parody of Lang's catchphrase, but it makes no sense unless you realize the Lang Xi in "Lang Xi says:" literally translates as "Wolf Child".
  • "Get lose, you can't compare with my powers!" (M Bison in the arcade version of Street Fighter II).
  • In The Ignition Factor, a firefighting game for the SNES, the fire chief says this when you inspect the map before starting a mission: "Put the castle together and push the button. And then you'll be able to reach it. I wish I could tell you more, but I have no clue what I'm talking about." It seems the translator had no clue either, since a correct translation would have been, "If you move the cursor to the place you're interested in and press the button, you can examine that area." The problem was that the translator misread "kaasoru" as "castle" instead of "cursor". The game seems to have plenty of other mistakes that are likely caused by not bothering to understand the context of the messages.
  • Web Games made by Beijing ELEX Co. Ltd. usually suffer from this, especially the German translations, which were apparently translated from English after being translated from Mandarin Chinese, sometimes downright bordering on Translation Train Wreck as a result. Happy Harvest is particularly infamous for this, especially in its original release, parts of which were hardly decipherable. Translations have improved in newer versions, but still contain mistakes like both components of "horseman" being translated individually ("Pferdemann"), invoking images of a centaur (or a Funny Animal) rather than an equestrian. Their other games fare no better; Cafe Time for instance, besides strange grammar and parts being left entirely untranslated, renders "counter" (the piece of furniture) as someone who counts, and "serve" (as in serving food) in the sense of serving a customer, implying that you would need to bring food to your food.
  • The mangled French dub of Assassin's Creed II gives us the gem "VOUS LE PAIEREZ DE VOITRE VIE!"[5], an extremely mangled French equivalent of the English idiom "You will pay with your life!"
    • Which is made doubly incomprehensible by the fact that Assassin's Creed II is made by Ubisoft, which is based in Montreal, Canada... a place where French is hardly an uncommon language.
  • Persian fan-translation of Call of Duty Modern Warfare suffers from EXTREME idiotic translation. One notable example is "Ditto" for "Copy that".
  • Outro of the Human campaign of Reign of Chaos. Arthas announces that: "this kingdom will fall, and from its ashes a new order will rise that will shake the very foundation of the world". Apparently, the idiot who translated it into Russian managed to confuse "shake" with "shape", as Arthas says "...wil become the foundation of the world".
  • The Shining Force series is full of these. It gives us quotes such as: "I know you want me to be die!" and "Why did you kill sir Howel? How can you be so mean?"
  • In a Russian translation of Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the mission objectives in the first level was (mis)translated from "Find Captain Keyes" to "Find the Captain's Keys".
  • Golden Sun hilariously translated several attacks wrongly. Most of these ("Death Seize" (Scythe)", the Blessing (Breath) attacks) were fixed in The Lost Age... only for confusion to hit Ulmuch (Hsu) (the translators had apparently forgotten his Dub Name Change) and Dullahan's "Formina Sage" (Fulminous Edge) attack. Names in Dark Dawn look like they're all correct, but only time will tell for certain.
  • In Star Wars: Galactic Battleground the Italian translation got a really nice one: someone translated "carbon" into "carbone", which in Italian means "coal". Who could seriously think to produce durasteel for darktroopers armor and whatnot with coal?
    • from Latin (root language for italian): carbo=coal. And coal is composed of carbon.
  • The House of the Dead series, especially the second game, is defined by its amusing translation. It takes skill to have voice actors you've just grabbed off of the street say lines like "Don't come! Don't come!" without snickering.
    • The French subtitles were just terrible. "La maudite La Roue du Destin... Nous devons la détruire !" i.e. "The cursed The Wheel of Fate... We must destroy it !"
  • The Genesis version (the only one to be translated) of Valis: The Fantasm Soldier. For example, "Get Fantasm Juely!", and "Welcome to fantasy world, Yuko". And Valis II for the TurboGrafx-16 CD has gems such as "I am the Red Salamander Zaruga, one of Roglas' 12 generals. Come warrior Valri, let's engage in combat." Also, Roglas (the Big Bad of the first game) is referred to as "the Roglas King" in the localizations, and his minions are collectively called the Roglas Army.
  • In the North American version of Kingdom Hearts II, some of the Organization XIII members' original names were mistranslated. Xigbar's original name was rendered as Bleig instead of the correct Braig, Xaldin's as Dilin instead of Dilan and Lexaeus's as Eleus instead of Aeleus.
    • While not a bad translation by any means, the English release of Kingdom Hearts 358 Days Over 2 suffers from unfortunate inconsistency issues with the names of some Heartless, especially for those who have played previous games. For example, the Heartless known as "Loudness" in all Japanese versions is called "Crescendo" in the English version of Kingdom Hearts II, but renamed to "Loudmouth" in the English version of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Other examples are "Surveillance" in Japanese, called "Surveillance Robot" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Watcher" in Days, "Mad Dog" in Japanese called "Rabid Dog" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Bad Dog" in Days, and "Aiming Cannon" in Japanese called "Cannon Gun" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Li'l Cannon" in Days. They already had English names, why give them new ones?
    • An example from Kingdom Hearts II itself is the Heartless named Magnum Loader. Sounds like a good enough name, until you realise its Japanese name was "Magna Roader", which, aside from making infinitely more sense (since the Heartless has a wheel and "drives" around), is also a Shout-Out to the enemies of the same name from Final Fantasy VI.
  • Many gamers claim Crusader of Centy's "The data have been saved" is of bad translation, but is actually a grammatically correct sentence. ("Data" is plural for the seldom-used "datum"). No such excuse for the rest of the game, though...
  • The French subtitles of Sonic Adventure 2 are horribly mangled, to the point one thinks They Just Didn't Care. "Le prototype est resté en vie et a placé la station sur une course de collision course de collision avec la planète !", which roughly translates as "The prototype has stayed alive and located the station on a collision race collision race with the planet !". And yes, they did repeat "course de collision".
    • The English version of Sonic Heroes had Tails saying "Look at all those Eggman's robots!".
      • They also mixed up "robot" and "clone" in Team Dark's ending, leading to a lot of very confused fans.

Rouge: So Shadow is... a robot?
Omega: So you know about cloning.

  • In Gargoyle's Quest, Firebrand fights "Rushifell" (Lucifer) to determine which of them is the true Red Blaze.
  • The French translation of The Sims 2 totally ruined the whole Bella Goth's abduction plot. While they translated her name as "Sonia Gothik" in the first game and in the Goth's family tree in the sequel, they changed Strangetown Bella's name to "Kathy Lalouche". Many French players have no idea that "Sonia" and "Kathy" are supposed to be the same person.
    • The German translation had a few examples of being too literal in translating - when clicking on a full training potty, the game tells you 'Leer' as in it is empty rather than to empty it, which would be 'Leeren'.
    • In the the original The Sims, clicking on a skunk will cause the option "Pet" to pop up. Choosing it will make your sim attempt petting the creature, with invariably stinky results. In the Finnish version, however, the command was translated as "Lemmikki", which is the word for the domesticated animal, not the act of petting something. This can cause the player to believe that choosing the action will make the sim try and get the skunk to be their pet, which is not possible.
    • Also, in The Sims 2, you are given the option to "Fire" a nanny if you want to. In an early version, however, it was translated in Finnish as "Ammu", which means "Shoot". One can only imagine the disappointent of the players who expected their sim to pull out a gun on the offending nanny...
    • In the original Sims' Makin' Magic, you can have a cat-sized pet dragon which you can, among other things, pet and groom (as in clean with a brush). This Troper knows a Russian version of the game where the translators picked... the wrong meaning of 'groom', and translated it to mean "the guy who marries the bride".
  • The original Grand Theft Auto's Italian translation seems to be fine for the most part, but it has at least one mistake. One of the missions in the first scenario begins with the text, "Bubby's wife, Skye, has been visitin' a friend in Central Estoria. Go get her." The Italian translator translated the last three words as "Vai a farla fuori." The problem is, "farla fuori" means "get her" as in "kill her" -- whereas the intended meaning was simply "pick her up". In other messages, the game makes it clear in both languages that killing Skye is supposed to be a bad thing.
  • The first Streets of Rage game had very minimal text, but the dialogue for the final boss had a big glaring error. When he makes you the offer to join his side, he says "Would you become my right-hand man?" If you deliberately try to get the bad ending, the final boss will say before making his offer "You're no ordinary man." He will refer to the player character as a man, even if the player is using Blaze, a female character.
  • In the English version, Alys of Phantasy Star IV is nicknamed the "Eight Stroke Sword", and she hates the name with a passion and scolds people for using it; but some players wondered why she hates having such a cool name. In the Japanese version, she was called "Yatsuzaki Lyla", which would be more accurately translated as "Lyla the Disemboweler" or "Rip-Their-Guts-Out Lyla".
  • One of the many complaints with the Japanese translation of Modern Warfare 2 is that the line "Remember, no Russian" at the beginning of the eponymous mission "No Russian" is translated as "Kill them, the Russians"--not entirely inappropriate to the result of the mission, mind, but entirely different from the intended meaning (one character warning his squadmates not to speak in Russian so as to appear as American tourists).
  • A lot of Genesis games had multilingual manuals in Europe with several languages present on every page, each of them seperated in their own column which also often had duplicates of whatever screenshot they had originally used there. This naturally often lead into unintentional hilarity, such as the Streets of Rage manual calling Blaze Fielding Pekka Peltonen in Finnish, a hilariously generic male name as well as the manual for Quackshot replacing the universally accepted Finnish translation of Gyro Gearloose (Pelle Peloton) with a much more literal and a lot more confusing Valle Vaihteeton. Considering how ridiculously popular Donald Duck has always been here, you'd think they would've bothered to look it up a bit more.
  • Opoona's translation, while... servicable, does have several notable and bizarre errors. One particular art piece in the game has its name rendered as Octopus Ballet, Octopus Bounce, and Taco Volley. The "taco" part probably comes from the Japanese word for octopus ("tako"), but the rest is up for debate. The game also does things like constantly misspell character's names, and there are some confusing item names as well (like the "Pet Gauge," which is actually a Pet Cage).
  • Done intentionally by Minecraft's achievement pop-ups. "Achievement get!"
  • The French version of Clock Tower on the Playstation has many hilarious examples. Some proves that the translators never actually played the game. For example, when you finish an ending, the ending appears on the ending list with a mention "Cleared". They took the wrong meaning and translated it "Effacer" ("Delete"). Which is just confusing.
  • Phantasy Star Zero's blue Ar Rappies and pink Rab Rappies seem to be a bad translation, considering the fact, that in Phantasy Star Online, the blue Rappies were called "Al Rappy" (jap. アル・ラッピ aru rappi) while the pink ones were calles "Love Rappy" (jap.ラブ・ラッピ rabu rappi). As the "u's" at the end of English words, written in katakana, are in the most cases not pronounced (i.e. Bus (jap. バス basu)), it seems that the person did simply apply this rule.
  • The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time's French instruction booklet was obviously (badly) translated from English. The best part : they translated "Light Arrows" as "Flèches légères", which means that these arrows are not heavy...
  • The German version of Civilization IV translates "Power" in the statistics screen as "Elektrizität" (electricity). It's about military power.
  • Giniro. The game on the start let you choose to play with either English or Japanese text. If you'll choose English, you'll see a lot of awkard lines like "In this place we need not to talk. We can express without talking here", "I don't know he is alive, a man who felt down first. He is look up me and say"
  • Bust-a-Move 4 (the English localization of Puzzle Bobble 4) is full of endearingly awful Blind Idiot Translation, particularly in the story mode dialogue.
  • In Deus Ex Human Revolution, mailboxes on the fictional Chinese island of Hengsha can be seen that say "Hengsha Post" on the side. However, the Chinese characters used the translate the word "post" refer to something like a post on a bulletin board or message board rather than mail.
  • Blazing Star: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough, see you next time, bye-bye!" This was the Trope Namer for Epic Fail.
  • Call of Duty United Offensive has all your team messages in German if you're on the German team. Said messages are all translated and pronounced correctly. Unfortunately, in CTF, the messages for "we have the enemy flag" and "the enemy has our flag" are reversed. The (English) text still displays correctly, but the conflicting audio makes life rather more confusing than it needs to be if you happen to speak German.
  • The Swedish translation of Gameboy RPG Sword Of Hope was clearly translated by someone with little knowledge of fantasy and mythology, leading to a lot of butchered terminology. Most memorable is probably the translation of "Treant" to "Trädmyra", literally "Tree ant". It is clearly depicted as a humanoid tree.
  • Independant game Dungeon Defenders has these on the setup screen for the Spanish version: Save gets translated as "ahorrar", as in "save money with Geico", Launch becomes "Lanzamiento" as in Launching the rocket, Push to talk, and Restore defaults are not even translated. Close gets translated as "Cerca", as in you're too close. Swap remains untranslated once, but then gets translated twice as "canje". Mods gets translated, for some reaon as "conversiones". No idea why. Of course, once in the game it gets worse, much worse.
    • The German version is just as bad: Exit got translated as "Ausfahrt", which indeed means exit...of an Autobahn. "Save" and "Close" are translated in exactly the same sense (and thus exactly as wrong) as in the Spanish game.
  • Magical Cannon Wars: It gets to the point that nobody even knows what's happening.

Olivia: "Fight with me over the supremacy of the world. I was the country's Magical Girl Britannia."
Akira: "And the child earlier, why fight to Nantes?"
Olivia: "You know I'm a law of this world."
Akira: "I care not fight."
Olivia: "Looking to win the all clear."
Akira: "I thought out!"

  • PuLiRuLa is full of such Engrish phrases as "That town is so head that no persons can live in." Then again, very little of what goes on in this game makes any sense.
  • And who could forget Super Smash Bros. Melee. The European translations (into French, German, Spanish, and Italian) seem to have been rushed (which is ironic given that this is the best-selling Gamecube game ever), so while you'll get good translations for most of the simple text (fun fact: about 90% of the game's text is in the trophy descriptions), a lot of the larger text is still in English. So if you have little to no knowledge of English, good luck trying to figure out what all those signs mean or what the announcer is saying.
    • Subverted in Brawl, where the European translations have almost no English text, and each language has a different announcer. The foreign announcers can get on your nerves much more easily than the English announcer, though, making you want to switch to English.
  • Penumbra: Overture had a quite good French translation (they even managed to render Red's speech patterns quite accurately), but Black Plague... was not nearly as good. For starters, Red's name was blindly translated as "Rouge" in-game (though amazingly, they got it right in the intro), and then you had a lot of sentences that don't really make sense unless you read the English text they have been translated from, since they followed the original sentences' structure word-for-word, like "Je plaisantais au sujet de la chose 'qui venait le prendre'", which was "I was only joking about the "come, get him" thing" in the original. [6]
  • The german demo (and possibly the retail version) of 1998's Spec Ops: Rangers Lead The Way had a hilariously bablefish-translated readme file attached. The highlights: (U.S. Army) Rangers turn into (Forest) Rangers, i.e. men who work in the woods taking care of trees and animal populations etc. (Förster). Navy SEALs turn into literal seals i.e. something that locks a door or similar for good (Versiegelung). Then there's the multitude of different first-generation 3D accelerator chip brands that are translated literally: Stingray 3D (Stachelrochen 3D), Orchid Righteous (Rechtschaffende Orchidee),...
  • The English-language manual of Mighty Bomb Jack describes what the three Power-Up levels do under the oddly phrased heading "amplified of mighty power." The manual's enemy descriptions are also highly amusing, e.g.: "It narrates the pyramid legend weirdly, 'Weird! Weird!'"
  • This troper noticed some 'odd' consistencies when starting the German version of Dungeon Defenders, or at least when trying to change the Graphics of it. In the upper right corner was the X button, which read 'in der Nähe von' which translates to 'Close by'. Close but no Cigar. When I wanted to save my costum graphics the button was labeled as 'Sparen', which is another interpretation from Save but not close either. Again no Cigar. The most ridicolous translation I came across though was when I wanted to have a 'Costum' resolution, which was translated as 'Brauch', which is a Costum as well. But once more. No close but no Cigar.
  • The Spanish setting of Contra: Shattered Soldier translated the game's "hit rate" display (which shows the percentage of unique enemies destroyed by the player in each stage) as "taza de velocidad" (speed rate).
  • All Monster Rancher games, and sometimes even the anime, dip into this, but it really shines in the GBC Monster Rancher Battle Card Game.
  • The English version of Digimon World 2, while having okay translation job for most of the dialogue, suffers badly with the tech descriptions. Due to the character limit, technique description is restricted to a short sentence (ex. Pepper Breath's description is the straightforward "Shoots a fireball", as it is a basic damaging Attack tech). This results in horribly botched explanations on how a tech is supposed to work. For some examples:
    • Black Pearl Shot, whose description is "Attacks with no defense". It is an Attack tech, and it can be seen that it leaves the user with "no defense", taking damage as if it has 0 Defense in the current round. Surely it can be reworded as something better like "Attacks, but leaves user defenseless" or similar?
    • Evil Charm's description, meanwhile, veers into Translation Train Wreck. "Fade away spell confusion". What?[7]
    • Techs that target a random enemy have no explanation regarding this. All the player sees when using one of these is the fact that the "TARGET" markers appear on all three enemies as if it is an Area of Effect tech (these, at least, explain their range on their description), only to turn out that this is not the case.
    • Even Assists are not safe. For an example from this category, Darkness Ray, one of the element manipulation techs. While other techs of this type are more or less straightforward despite their inconsistent wording (add flame effects, gives mech effects, adds nature effects, adds water effects), this one takes the cake for having the description "Learn dark power attacks". No matter what, the affected Digimon will not learn any new Darkness-type attacks at all, but their attacks will turn Darkness-type.
    • The terms "stunned" and "paralyzed" are often interchangeable with each other, which makes certain tech descriptions that require the condition of the former (Shadow Scythe, Necro Magic) confusing, as the context is meant to be "knocked out".
  1. ↑ namely, when its tail is pointing upwards
  2. ↑ "Live-fire course" has somehow turned into "live fireproofing test", for starters. And that's just the tip of the cringe-inducing iceberg.
  3. ↑ There actually is a German equivalent for this - "jemandem ein Pfund geben" means to sock somebody. It's not exactly standard German, though
  4. ↑ ????
  5. ↑ equivalent line in the English dub is "I'll kill you for what you've done!"
  6. ↑ A more accurate translation would be "Je plaisantais quand je disais "Viens le chercher", because the translated sentence here just means "I was joking about the thing 'that came to take him'"
  7. ↑ It is presumably meant to be "magic spell causes confusion", which fits its purpose the closest. How the translators ended up with that mistake is a riddle of the ages.
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