History BlindIdiotTranslation / Anime

* And then there's ''LightNovel/VampireHunterD: Bloodlust'', which transliterates "dhampir" (half-vampire) as "dunpeal", and carries the same mistransliteration into the English version, to the point FanFiction continues using the term... Streamline's dub of the original movie also had this mistake. It wasn't fixed until Sentai Filmwork's 2015 redub of the original movie.

* English translations of ''Area88'' refer to the team of pilots who hunt down deserters as "Escape Killers". To an American, this looks like a mistake in romanizing of "Escaped Killer". Kaoru Shintani's actual intention may have been "Escapee Killer", which still sounds odd. This pronunciation has actually made it into at least one dub of the anime. The Viz/Eclipse adaptation of the manga dodged the issue by renaming them "The Enforcers".

* And then there's ''LightNovel/VampireHunterD: Bloodlust'', which transliterates "dhampir" (half-vampire) as "dunpeal", and carries the same mistransliteration into the English version, to the point FanFiction continues using the term...

* The Polish ''over''dub of ''Anime/DragonBallZ'' definitely takes the cake here as being translated from the French dub. Examples? Piccolo is "Satan Littleheart" (Szatan Serduszko), Cell is "Protophyte" (Komórczak - it actually sounds less sophisticated in Polish) and Master Roshi is "the Genius Turtle" (Genialny Żółw). We also have Kakarotto as either "Clown" or "Whale" (Kaszalot), Mr. Popo as Mr. Momo (understandable, as "Popo" means something mildly rude in Polish and French), and some really ingenious techniques. Big Bang Attack as "Mega Garlic Cannon" among others. The manga translation has it better (Piccolo is called "Satan Piccolo" and Roshi is addressed either as "the Turtle Hermit" or "Divine Mastah").

*** Also, since the French dub had already used Satan as a name for Piccolo (based on his title being great demon king - daimao - and because it probably sounded more threatening than a musical instrument), they were in a bind when a character whose name actually ''was'' Satan showed up; so they renamed him Hercule (no 's' at the end in french). You can guess where this is going, making this a very convoluted subversion, despite being just as idiotic.

*** Considering that his Japanese name (Gyū-Maō) means something like "Demon King of the Oxen," a name revolving around Satan makes some sense.
** The name Kakarotto was problematic in every translation that used the French dubbing as a basis, as it never made it clear that this was Son Goku's real name. Its transliterations ranged from Cachalote ("Sperm whale") in the Portuguese dub to Kasalo (pronounced "Kásáló", meaning the nonsensical "One who does pulp") in the Hungarian dub, and Vegeta seemingly pulls the name out of nowhere, only to never use it again. In the Spanish dub, he's never called by that name in the anime, but in the movies, he's called "Karoto" in the first Broly movie (maybe because "Kaka" sounds too similar to "Caca", "sh*t") and "Kakalot" (keep in mind it's a proper romanization) in the rest.

** The Italian dub of Dragonball is just as bad. We get three 'Satans': "Al Satan" = The Ox King, "Al Satan" (again, without any kind of logic)[[note]]Actually, after the introduction of this other "Al Satan", the former one was renamed with his Japanese name Jyuma[[/note]] = Piccolo Daimao, and the well known and loved Mr. Satan. Muten Roshi is called the "Sea Turtle Genius" (Genio delle Tartarughe di mare). Tenshinan becomes Tensing, Chaotzu becomes Rif (???), Piccolo becomes Junior, and so on. And of course there are some horrible mistakes in the technique names translations - the worst of them all probably being the one which involves Genkidama and Kaioken. Basically, we get to see Goku training with King Kai (in Italian "Kaio") and learning the Genkidama ("Spherical Energy"). Then he goes back to Earth - and when he first uses the Kaioken against Nappa, someone arbitrarily decided that had to be the Genkidama, so they made him scream "Spherical Energy!". Which of course did not make any sense, and was later replaced by the proper Kaioken. The worst example of all, though, has to be Gohan's name - it's stated that Goku named him after his grandfather, but in the italian dub Goku's grandfather is named Son ''Gon''.

*** Add to this that the weird name changes (Young Satan, Genius Turtle, and the rest) also made it through. ''Anime/DragonballGT'' was dubbed a decade later, this time from Japanese, but half of the characters still retained their crazy French names. Only minor corrections were made, like "renaming" Momo to the original Popo, calling Trunks by his full name (formerly, he was simply called Trunk), and they also got rid of the older dubs' habit of treating Son Goku as if it was a single word. The dialog even worked in some unchanged Japanese names (like Tsufuru instead of Tuffle), which resulted in even more inconsistency. That said, ''GT'''s dub also contained genuine translation hiccups. For instance, Kamehameha would often switch back to the older dubs' "Kamehame", and there was some weird inconsistency pertaining to all the "Kai" names -- Is it Kibito Kai or Kibito? Kaishin or Kaioshin? King Kai meanwhile retained the name "Kaito" from the old dubs. Further, there was one instance when the Super Star Warrior state (which is what both the old ''Z'' and newer ''GT'' dubs called Super Saiyan) was mistranslated as "Super Warrior Star".

** The Spaniard dub, derived from French, also has a few issues. "Kamehameha" got translated as "Life Wave" (Onda Vital) for most of the series, sometimes using other variations. The problem is that the term "Life Wave" was used to replace the Kaio-Ken, Ki-ho-ho (Tri-Beam in English) in one or two ocassions, when they had their own translations. When the Latin American internet got notice of this blatant mistake (especially compared with the Mexican dub, which was based off the Japanese original and left most of the technique names untranslated), the outrage about that translation was so huge it ended up cementing Spaniard dubs as the ButtMonkey of Hispanic translations and the trope in Spanish [[TropeNamer actually ended up being known as "Life Wave"]]. Some people defend the Spaniard dub to some degree, as the latter tends to get MisBlamed for mistakes that are actually inherited from the French dub, but translating "Kamehameha" as "Life Wave" ''is'' exclusive to the Spaniard dub.

** So needless to reiterate, the attack names in many of the French-derivative dubs were just plain screwed-up. Worth mentioning are instances when "Kamehameha" came out as "Kamehame Personality Wave" or "Kamehame *insert pity trashtalk here*", and pretty much every attack was named "Fist of the Sun" [[note]]known as Solar Flare in English translations[[/note]] at one point, be it a simple Kamehameha or a Destructo Disk. There were episodes which consistently attached the name to the Neo Tri-Beam attack, and the ''actual'' Fist of the Sun technique was renamed to "Sunbeam Beating" or something similar.
** Another curiosity of a few French-based localizations: Frieza became Freezer. Okay, that's fair. But then, his father Cold, who has a meaningful ice-based name to begin with, is called Cord.

** The English translation of the 2nd movie was rather odd. While the dub pronounced the BigBad's name as Dr. Willow, the subtitled version calls him Dr. Wheelo. Neither are correct, since the character's name is play on "Uirou", which is a type of Japanese steamed cake from Nagoya. Dr. Uiro's henchmen are named after local Nagoya delicacies (i.e. Dr. Cochin, Kishime, Ebifurya, Misokattsun).

* ''Anime/TransformersArmada'' and ''Anime/TransformersEnergon'' were created on so rushed a schedule as to feature first-draft translations as finalized scripts, and even unfinished animation used for broadcast. Translation errors fly about freely, characters are regularly referred to with the wrong name, there are typos in the ''title cards'', and a hugely disappointing proportion of dialogue, put simply, does ''not make sense''. This is especially problematic in ''Energon,'' in which ''every single episode'' has plot points that are obscured by dialogue that apparently got most of the words but missed the point. Thankfully, their sequel series, ''[[Anime/TransformersCybertron Cybertron]]'', received a competent localization, appropriately peppered with {{Woolseyism}}s and other cleverness that, y'know... made sense. Even so, in one episode Thundercracker famously referred to himself as Starscream and Crosswise was called by his working-name Smokescreen for a while. Although these were later corrected, most foreign dubs were produced based on the erroneous dialogue.

* The ''VisualNovel/DanganRonpa'' anime dub has a particularly bad example where, in the first episode, Naegi's younger sister Komaru calls him "little bro". What makes this espically puzzling is that the localization of the first game had been out for other a year at that point and the word used in the original Japanese means "elder brother", implying that ''Creator/{{Funimation}} not only didn't bother to consult readily available sources, but didn't even translate the original script and instead used the subtitle as the base.

** Also in the first live-action movie Naomi Misora gets a comforting [[http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/9255/pdvd001h.png letter]] from the FBI.

* The English dub: Ever wondered why the Pokémon League tournaments are called conferences? You can thank a mistranslation for that. Their Japanese name is ポケモンリーグの大会, which translates "Pokémon League Tournament". However, the last word, 大会, can also be translated as "conference", depending on the context. Given that the event is question is a tournament in which league participant battle each other, it's clear that that's not the intended word here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

* The English dub: Ever wondered why the Pokémon League tournaments are called conferences? You can thanks a mistranslation for that. Their Japanese name is ポケモンリーグの大会, which translates "Pokémon League Tournament". However, the last word, 大会, can also be translated as "conference", depending on the context. Given that the event is question is a tournament in which league participant battle each other, it's clear that that's not the intended word here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

* The english dub: Ever wondered why the Pokémon League tournaments are called conferences? You can thanks a mistranslation for that. Their Japanese name is ポケモンリーグの大会, which translates "Pokémon League Tournament". However, the last word, 大会, can also be translated as "conference", depending on the context. Given that the event is question is a tournament in which league participant battle each other, it's clear that that's not the intended word here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

* The Latin American Spanish dub of ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'', since season 10. Though mistakes and inconsistences were always made, they usually were ignored due to nostalgia and the generally good quality of the rest of the work. But then bad dub stroke and translationg mistakes and inconsitenses became much more evident (so big I wouldn't encourage listing every single one of them) and many people were turned off by the series. The change of dub company for season 13 seemed to brighten up things a bit, although the translator is using Nintendo of Europe's names for cities and attacks making the new dub something really odd to watch (name conventions between Latin America and Spain are vastly different when it comes to this, since Latin American dub translates directly from the English dub, and Spanish dub translates according to the Spanish games from Europe).

*** Though most Portuguese fans tend to pass "Cachalote" off as an [[StealthInsult insult]]. Given he only uses it in GT[[labelnote:*]]Which was dubbed in Portuguese before there was French version, so they had to rely on both the japanese and the American versions[[/labelnote]] [[WildMassGuessing it's a possibility]].

** The LatinAmerican dub (itself based on the 4kids US dub)was alright, but in case of the duels it couldn't appear to choose between different translations giving us different terms for the same thing ("campo santo" and "cementerio" for graveyard, "Dragón Blanco OjiAzul" and "Dragón Blanco de Ojos Azules" for Blue-Eyes White Dragon, "mazo", "pila" y "baraja" for deck, etc). It also couldn't choose between translating the monsters names from english or not. It could be excused by the fact that there were at least 4 dubbing studios for the series, but sometimes they wiggled between translations in the same episode and worst of all, between scenes.

** Then there's the subtitles on Manga UK's release of the same series, which seem to constantly straddle the line between this and TranslationTrainWreck. Practically every other line is mistranslated, even the most basic things that one would assume couldn't possibly be misinterpreted, and these translations range from "Well they kinda got the nuances wrong" to "Holy shit that is not even close to what was being said do you even know Japanese translator." Just as a random example, the final line of the first opening theme is translated as "The blood red of twilight pierces through". A more accurate translations would be "The crimson bow and arrow pierces through the twilight". And this is one of the ''less'' glaring errors in their subtitles. One wonders why they even bothered making their own script rather than just using the subtitles from FUNimation.

[[quoteright:350:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/image_055.jpeg]]

-->"What a beautiful Duwang!" ''(chew)'' "There must be no other place as pretty as this town. This feels like a picnic."

** The [[http://kentaifilms.blogspot.com/2009/05/fist-of-eastern-star.html?zx=b1f604a44ad646b Discotek sub]] of TheMovie, on the other hand, is just filled with instances where the translator did not double check his translation or [[TheyJustDidntCare simply didn't care]]. ''Hokuto Shinken'' is repeatedly misspelled as "Hokuto Kenshin" (even though the correct spelling is used as well) and many terms used throughout are mistranslated as well (e.g. "''denshousha''" is translated as "savior" instead of "successor", while "''aniue''", a formal word for "elder brother" that Jagi uses when he's sucking up to Raoh, becomes "master" instead). Most {{egregious}}ly, there are several instances where a character is [[CallingYourAttacks mentioning the names of their technique]] and the translator, not knowing what the characters were saying, simply replaced it with some made-up embellishment (i.e. ''Nanto Gokusatsu Ken'' or "South Star Hell Murder Fist" is translated as "Nanto cannot be harmed").

* There's a store in Melbourne that sells anime [=DVDs=] that had Japanese subtitles translated to Chinese and then translated to English. They have never, ever correctly spelled a character name, sometimes just giving up and giving them a random English name instead. Hayate, the male love interest of ''{{Pretear}},'' started out being called Sarah, then Jingje, then finally Hayate. The same [=DVDs=] also translated all the male characters as female but kept all references to female characters as female, except for the main character, who was apparently the only male.

** The Spaniard dub, derived from French, also has a few issues. "Kamehameha" got translated as "Life Wave" (Onda Vital) for most of the series, sometimes using other variations. The problem is that the term "Life Wave" was used to replace the Kaio-Ken, Ki-ho-ho (Tri-Beam in English) in one or two ocassions, when they had their own translations. When the Latin American internet got notice of this blatant mistake (especially compared with the Mexican dub, which was based off the Japanese original and left most of the technique names untranslated), the outrage about that translation was so huge it actually ended up cementing Spaniard dubs as the ButtMonkey of Hispanic translations and with "Life Wave" becoming the TropeNamer in the Hispanic internet. Some people do defend the Spaniard dub though, as the latter tends to get MisBlamed for mistakes that are actually inherited from the French dub (translating "Kamehameha" as "Life Wave" ''is'' exclusive to the Spanish dub, though).

* The English subtitles of episode 10-21 of ''GingaNagareboshiGin'' appears to have been translated by someone who knew Japanese, but not English, given the massive amount of grammatical errors than can be found throughout. Some down right mistakes were also done, with the crowner probably being "The two of you, go spy on them" which got translated to "You two will go rape them."