Intentional Engrish for Funny

"CONGRATULATIONSSS! YOU HAVE WIN!"
—victory message in Hero Klungo Sssavesss teh World!!!, the Stylistic Suck minigame of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Describe Of Intentional Engrish For Funny To Here.

This is writing anything in the style of a Blind Idiot Translation or Translation Train Wreck, to make it funny, due to the unintentional hilarity of those tropes. Typical "Engrish" is the most popular style, particularly using the infamous opening of Zero Wing as a template. Just have fun with improper placing of articles and prepositions, screwing up plural and singular forms, throwing in Blunt Metaphors Trauma terms, or just use the wrong word for what the sentence calls for.

Often this can be done by doing a deliberate Recursive Translation.

A Sub-Trope of Stylistic Suck.

Compare Strange Syntax Speaker.

Contrast Purple Prose, Beige Prose.

Examples of Intentional Engrish for Funny include:

Advertising

  • Appears in some spam for "male enhancement products": "Present to the girlfriend unforgettable night! Make happy the girlfriend! Charge by sexual energy!" [1]

Anime and Manga

  • The Mid-Childan Intelligent Devices from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha spoke odd English in the first season, probably because the writer just couldn't be bothered with proper grammar (Raising Heart's "I can be shot"). However, it stuck and the Devices nowadays are unimaginable without a healthy dose of slightly broken English dialogue.
    • The Movie, has the Devices speaking proper English (though Raising Heart keeps its Catch Phrase "Stand by ready!"). The only hiccup in the dialogue being what was presumably "strategy" being translated as "wisdom and tactics".
  • Angel Beats!: GET CHANCE AND LUCK!! Which is a reference to the same Blind Idiot Translation in the ending theme of City Hunter.

Comic Books

QUESTION: How do I know your method works?
ANSWER: Letters in thousands there in my files, from peoples in all life walks, testimonials, proved to us the Linguage Institute Method. Amazing to achieve results. If below, you send in the coupon, some of these letters I can share you with.

    • It was likely inspired by the Real Life inept phrasebook The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, better known as English as She is Spoke—the world's first ironic best-seller, read entirely for humor's sake (Mark Twain wrote a special introduction for a reprinting in the US). It contains such gems as "Your gun have it load? Let aim it! Let make fire him!"
    • The ad was distributed (with no credit to Moore) on a mailing list which added some spelling errors, including one that made the post even funnier. When the ad mentions that "countless men and women being who are held back in their social jobs and lives" because of their poor English, the re-posting leaves out the "o" in "countless".

Fan Works

Literature

  • Chuck Palahniuk's novel Pygmy is entirely written in Intentional Engrish for Funny.
  • In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, advertisements and posters for Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong are written in this style, although Mr. Lee speaks excellent English.

Live-Action TV

  • The mock game show Banzai! used vast amounts of Blind Idiot Translation for comedic effect, such as this clip about Squirrel Fishing. It should be noted that the Japanese characters used in the show graphics were, more often than not, total nonsense.
  • The menus of The IT Crowd series 2 DVD include a spot-on parody of Zero Wing, featuring scenes from the episodes translated into Intentional Engrish for Funny. For example, Roy's line "I don't know many heterosexual men who read Heat magazine." becomes "Man is gay for reading warmth."
  • One episode of Bones had Angela trying in vain to put together a baby toy. The instructions were written in this style.

Tabletop Games

  • One of the cards in Munchkin Fu is "Engrish Transrate Plobrem".
    • There's also Subtitles. The subtitles are translated "all your base are belong to us" in a Shout-Out.

Video Games

  • In Retro Game Challenge, the majority of the games are translated like this to maintain the game's overall Retraux feeling. "You shooted 27 asteroids!" and "Your adventure is not end!" are just two examples.
    • Though Guadia Quest's localization is more reminiscent of a typical Working Designs translation, with NPCs that show signs of Medium Awareness and a duck that says "Aclaf! Aclaf!"
  • Mondo Medicals and Mondo Agency are probably like this, as Cactus, the games' creator, hails from Sweden but is a fluent English speaker.
  • Fawful from Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga talks like this all the time. His most meme-tastic quotes "I HAVE FURY!" and "the mustard of your doom!" have contributed to making him one of the most popular villains in the series.
    • Fawful makes a comeback in Bowser's Inside Story, thus adding to his incredible list of memorable quotes.
  • Indie platformer Explodemon has the title character talk entirely in Intentional Engrish For Funny. Made all the funnier by the fact that everyone else doesn't.
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl/Platinum, a clown congratulates the player with "A Winner Is You!". It helps that the translator is a member of Something Awful.
    • Even earlier in the series, Pokémon Gold and Silver/Crystal had Earl (who even says "Want to be a winner is you?" when asking the player if he/she wants to hear his lectures on Pokémon) and a foreign Team Rocket member, who both speak broken English. Although the former also appears in Pokémon Stadium 2, he speaks English normally in it. The latter appears in Pokémon Black and White with his Engrish intact.
  • Digimon World 4 might do this. Leomon, sans memory, describes a fortress which he vaguely remembers being named "Dreadnaught". According to other mentions, it's actually named Dread Note - whether it's deliberate that Leomon said the wrong name isn't certain.
  • Prism Orange from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories.
  • The much happy Flash game Ching Chong Beautiful is to the brim this, like "Win Victory!" when level complete has been and "Continue Justice" for to continue level the next.
  • An Adventurer is You!
  • The [[[Adult Swim]]] Flash game My Lil' Bastard has this.
  • The Orz in Star Control 2 are so bizarre that the Translator Microbes cannot translate their language accurately. This is shown by replacing certain words that cannot be translated with the most suitable words marked with asterisks and the use of broken English.
  • One which has become a meme in the ZX Spectrum community is the ending of "Stop The Express": "Congraturation! You Sucsess!" Because of this, the first web site dedicated to Speccy game endings was named the Congraturations Archive.
    • Which is actually just plain old Engrish; Stop The Express is an early game by Japanese developer Hudson Soft (later of Bomberman fame).
  • Mafia II: When Vito is in jail, you can try to speak to an obviously insane man who will repeat "you have no chance to survive, make your time!"
  • Iji contains the Scrambler which, if found and activated, translates the game's standard English into broken English. The distortion gets worse the longer the scrambler is left on.
  • Hero Core has "Retro!" as one of its language options. If selected, it makes the whole game appear (comically) poorly translated.
  • Many games from SNK's Neo Geo arcade console had some games that could very well result in this. Take Magician Lord once you get the "Continue" screen...

"Again changes to Hell"

  • Fez: Just about everyone talks this way except Dot.
  • Stinkoman 20 X 6 parodies Japanese-made video games from the NES era, translation and all.
  • The messages you/the frog gets at the end of each level of Zuma are written like this.

Web Animation

  • Some of the Homestar Runner games, such as "Secret Collect", seem to be based on this, including being the Trope Namer for Your Head Asplode. It gets really silly, since the games in-universe aren't supposed to be made by people who don't speak English.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • This entry at DozerfleetWiki explains the subject matter of Ferris State's Sociology 225 class entirely in Intentional-Engrish-For-Funny.
  • Used in one of the unofficial endings for Red vs. Blue episode 100, "Insert Quarter," where Sarge breaks Vic's computer causing a broken English message to appear saying "You have winner!"
  • "All your drugs are belong to us!"
    • Made all the more amusing because the character announcing it is...well, Zero.
  • A Let's Play of SWAT 4 at The Spoony Experiment has a level ending with a "Russian police traning video" using gameplay footage of Spoony's many failures. Comments are subtitled in Russian, with translated subtitles reading "NOT TO BE STANDING IN WAY FOR COMRADES MAKING ENTRANCE!" and "BEWARE OF JEWS MAKING SNEAK"

Western Animation

Eigo ga mechakucha (The English is absurd/nonsensical)
Daijoubu (It's okay), we do it all the time!

  • The Simpsons had the subtitles on the ridiculous Japanese dish soap commercial from the episode "In Marge We Trust". "I'm disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?"
  • In Phineas and Ferb: Summer Belongs To You!, the lyrics to the song "J-Pop (Welcome To Tokyo)" are in this style. It's also animated in the style of a Caramelldansen Vid, complete with anime-esque art:

Welcome to Tokyo
Being glad that you are here
We came visiting, delightful us
Welcome to Tokyo

  1. ↑ Such "creativity" is an attempt to get spams across e-mail filters, which duty is assassinating e-mails containing certain words commonly appearing in spams. And now you know!
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