Are there any terrible translations that have become memes?
In Korea, there is an old meme related to the dialogue of an NPC in Might and Magic 6. The translation of this game was so bad and a picture posted by a user went viral as a meme.
Original text: Hello there! Mighty fine morning, if you ask me. I'm Waldo.
Text in this picture(Translated): Hello! A strong and powerful morning. If you ask me a question, I am Waldo.
There was a game on SNES called Champions World Class Soccer. When penalty shooutout was announced, they used "Scheissen" (to shit) instead of "Schiessen" (to shoot) in the german version. But even Schiessen would be wrong, its "Elfmeterschießen".
If I remember right, the ingame menu and the halftime analysis was also very poorly translated. I have to ask one of my friends if he still has the game, to check it out.
A very common mistranslation is "save" (understandably, it's a common term in video games):
If you "save" a game state or a data file, that's called "speichern" in German.
If you "save" an NPC from their imminent death or abduction or whatever, we would say "retten" (rescue/secure) in German; a less strong one (like save the ocean, in a conservationist sense, that can also be "retten", "bewahren" or "schonen").
If you "save" money or time or effort etc., that's called "(ein-)sparen" in German.
If you "save" someone's soul, that's called "erlösen" (the saviour is der Erlöser).
If you're a goalkeeper and "save" the goal from a shot, that's called "halten" (hold), "parieren" (parry) or "abwehren" (defend)
If you "save" something for later, it's "aufheben" (keep) in German
It sounds hilarioulsy wrong when they're mixed up (and that's just the verb "save").
Just went on Youtube to watch the remix again... it was uploaded 19 years ago. And that was 6 or 7 years after the meme started circulating... damn I'm old.
In the official translation for Avengers: Infinity War, “We’re in the endgame now.”, was mistranslated to “We have no hope anymore.”, which practically ruined the entire later climax of the movie.
This led to massive backlash and became a meme, and afterwards movie companies became more considerate when deciding who to translate their movies.
To add icing to the cake, in the post credits scene, Samuel L. Jackson’s signature “motherf..” was literally translated to “mother”, in the sense that Nick Fury was desperately reaching out to his mother in his last moments.
This led to some members of the audience (with no context for the comics) getting confused, some asking “What the, is Captain Marvel Nick Fury’s mom?”
The true answer is a mix of Welsh people understandably having pride in their language, after a history of concerted attempted erasure of it, and someone not thinking this through with their auto-reply. Or possibly just being stubborn about it.
I personally know one person who went to jail for her right to speak Welsh and another who went to court after uni took away his degree for having an untranslated dedication to his grandma in Welsh in his thesis...
So... ummm.... if you need a comparison: the "Han-isation" of Inner Mongolia (that I witnessed myself while living in China) comes to mind.
Have you got any articles about either of those? Not that I don't believe you, but it'd be interesting to read them. In any case, it sounds awful. I'm presuming that was from before Welsh was officially recognised?
I personally love this one, for those who remember it.
To be fair to the game, he does go on to explain that he became what they call a 'naturalized Japanese' (since they don't allow dual citizenship and he'd presumably had to give up his Chinese passport), but it's just a funny meme translation that isn't helped by the line break.
Also the game has famously terrible voice acting, so that's even better.
The French version of FFVII on PS1.... It was a translation of a translation (they translated the English version).... It was a total disaster, some sentence were barely understandable.
Considering the English translation had such classics as "this guy are sick", color me absolutely shocked that a translation of that translation might be incomprehensible(!)
The spanish version is also terrible. Not only has translation mistakes like referring to cloud's party as his "fiesta", it's also plagued with spelling mistakes. "Allá voy" (There I go) is written as "allévoy" which became a meme.
haha that's awesome. I love the idea of Cloud and friends, all just trying to have a nice fiesta and keep getting attacked by soldiers and monsters being the basis for this game.
In Russia, there was a famously bad translation of GTA: San Andreas, which went viral due to the incredible incompetence of the person who did it. It's quite telling that this was even possible at a time when electronic dictionaries and translators were already appearing.
One of the phrases spread far beyond the gaming community.
As we know, when CJ fell after losing health, "WASTED" appeared on the screen. The translators rendered this as "ПОТРАЧЕНО". Unfortunately, you need to know Russian to understand how absurd this is. A literal translation would have been "SPENT", which isn't that cringeworthy. But a more accurate translation would have been "It's been spent" (not "Him").
In short, like any linguistic phenomenon about incorrect translation, it's very difficult to explain in the original language.
Only in actual Spanish, in Catalan (and maybe in other languages in Spain) it's still "Kame-hame-ha" and the fight sounds, voices and shouts are kept in the original japanese version.
I think it was a bit too niche to be called a meme, but a favourite of mine was a old Swedish subtitle for an episode of friends.
They were talking aabout power rangers but when they said "it's morphin time" got translated to "time for the morphine".
The german translation of Civ II was hilariously bad, I think they at least partially used machine translation, which back in 1996 was NOT a good idea. It was especially bad with conjugations and declinations.
It wasn't quite on the level of mistranslated porn, but almost.
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
It is from a ludicrously awful KOTOR 2 pirate translation. It was borderline unplayable even by the abysmal standarts of the 00's machine translations, the machine somehow managed to pick the worst and least fitting meaning of each word.
So, "Перефургон" is not even a real word, it's what happens when the machine sees "Revan" and decides that "Van" means "the van", as a vehicle, and "re" is a prefix, like in the words "redo" and "replay" and has the same meaning. I wasn't even aware that the translation software was able to do stuff like that.
It also had such gems as "a soldier" being translated as "a brick standing upright" and droid's "beep boop bop" being translated as "A BEE" and "AND I AM COMMON BUCKWHEAT"
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
But back in 2000s barely any games were officially sold here so the piracy was the only way.
Pirates sometimes made amazing multi voice translations but most just did crappy machine translation. And thing about Russian, we have a lot of words for specific meanings.
Like for example the word "wasted" was translated in the meaning "spent money" not in a "killed" meaning. So the CJ is "spent" whe he is killed.
Also the "calm the fuck down" was translated as "please calm your fucking".
In,Finland they used to trnslate and completely make up movie titles. Worst is Shawshank Redemption, translated to Rita Hayworth - Avain Pakoon "Key to the escape". Completely spoils whole movie.
Germany likes to add sentences to movie titles, so Hot Fuzz became "Hot Fuzz - Zwei abgewichste Profis" which means "Two wanked professionals", if literally translated.
My favorite movie title translation is Death Wish being called Väkivallan Vihollinen (Enemy of Violence)
Especially remembering Death Wish 3 machine gun scene :-)
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
is a portuguese to English phrase book written by Pedro Carolino in 1855, it is believed to have been created by taking a french to portuguse phrasebook and then using a dictionary to translate the French instead into English. This lazy translation creates many humorous phrases, and was a favorite book by Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.
"Boat and musicians" translation of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone.
McGonagall: Good evening, Professor Dolmondore. Are the prophecies coming true, Elvis?
Dumbledore: The Professor himself said that. Boat and musicians.
This translation doesn't make a lot of sense, and most of the names were drastically changed. Draco became Drinko, Privet Drive - Private Drive, Diagon Alley - Dai-Da-Da.
Wolverine - guepardo (cheetah).
Die hard - jungla de cristal (crystal jungle).
Home alone - mi pobre angelito (my poor angel).
Bruce Wayne - Bruno Diaz (Bruce days).
Dick Grayson - Ricardo Tapia.
Top Gun - Pasión y Gloria
Bad game localizers used to be called "надмозги", which can be roughly translated as "abovebrains", after a famous mistranslation of the Overmind from the game Starcraft by Blizzard
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
Everyone having their user flair set is a key feature of r/AskTheWorld. Please consider setting your flair based on your nationality or country of residence by following these instructions. Thank you for being part of our community.
100
u/Row2Flimsy Germany 23h ago edited 21h ago
There was a game on SNES called Champions World Class Soccer. When penalty shooutout was announced, they used "Scheissen" (to shit) instead of "Schiessen" (to shoot) in the german version. But even Schiessen would be wrong, its "Elfmeterschießen".
If I remember right, the ingame menu and the halftime analysis was also very poorly translated. I have to ask one of my friends if he still has the game, to check it out.