History BlindIdiotTranslation / Anime

* Horribly, horribly present in ''Manga/{{Hellsing}}''. From the fact that the title comes from "Van Helsing", which is only ever spelled with one 'L', to the fact that some British characters have names in Eastern order ("Seras Victoria" instead of "Victoria Ceres"), to opposite gender titles of nobility[[note]] It's actually worse than just the gender screw-up; it is strongly hinted that Integra's title is hereditary – KBE titles like "Dame" are ''never'' hereditary – thus her "proper" title should be either Baroness, Viscountess, Countess, or possibly Marchioness; regardless, she should '''''not''''' be called "Sir"[[/note]], to (most JustForFun/{{egregious}}ly) the fact that in the official subtitles a character whose name is [[{{Alucard}} "Dracula"]] [[SdrawkcabName reversed]] is called "Arucard". Because Bram Stoker wrote a book called ''Dracura'', apparently. The original author admitted that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote the English bits.

*** 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. This name was also used in [=FUNimation=]'s edited English dub for religious censorship reasons.

* Before ''Armada'' and ''Energon'', ''Transformers'' suffered a particularly infamous instance of this trope. The SoBadItsGood English ''Anime/TransformersHeadmasters'' dub changed dialogue so nonsensically that you got translations like "[[CrowningMomentOfFunny Fortress Maximus has come himself]]". There were also bizarre and completely pointless name changes, like renaming Blurr "Wally" and dubbing Spike as '''sparkle''' of all things. The whole dub has become a minor meme in the ''Transformers'' fandom and is often considered a good example of what can happen with incompetent dubbing elsewhere.

!!The Japanese does the animation and manghe (Anime and Manga)

* There is a bootleg of ''Manga/XxxHoLic'' in which every time Watanuki's surname appears, it ''always'' appears as its literal translation ([[MeaningfulName "April 1"]]).

** The Italian translation of the manga is a complete mess. Between [[SpellMyNameWithAnS wrong romanizations]] (Bandith Keith became "Bandit Kierce", a name that doesn't exist anywhere, and also many names that were GratuitousEnglish in Japanese were romanized in the wrong way - such as "Dynausor" instead of "Dinosaur" or "Ribaiasan" instead of "Leviathan"), [[InconsistentDub card names changing between chapters]], the translator thinking that minds and souls are the same thing (every GratuitousEnglish usage of "Mind" had a footnote translating it as "Anima", which is Italian for "Soul"), changing Yen with Euros in two random, unrelated chapters while talking about Yen in every other chapter.

* [[http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/ZMCZ-11854 Some merchandise]] for ''Anime/APlaceFurtherThanTheUniverse'' describes it as "A story that leads to the Antorctico." Yep, that's "Antarctica" with two of the A's replaced with O's. The same English sentence is spelled correctly in the anime itself, so most likely a non-English-speaker hand-copied it from the opening animation and misread two of the letters (the font they used makes lowercase "a" and "o" look very similar).

* [[http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/ZMCZ-11854 Some merchandise]] for ''Anime/APlaceFurtherThanTheUniverse'' describes it as "A story that leads to the Antorctico." Yep, that's "Antarctica" with two of the A's replaced with O's. The same English sentence is spelled correctly in the anime itself, so most likely a non-English-speaker hand-copied it from the opening animation and misread two of the letters.

** The US version of the ''Yu-Gi-Oh'' manga would occasionally refer to Mai Kujaku (Mai Valentine) as Mai Shiranui. Mai Shiranui is a character from a [[VideoGame/FatalFury completely different franchise]].

** The French dub messed up and forgot that Jack, other than being a proper name, is also the face value for a card. This resulted in card names like the Knight of the King, the Knight of the Queen, and the Knight of Jack, whoever that Jack may be.

** In Episode 12 of the ''Manga/{{Boruto}}'' anime, when Boruto and Mitsuki talk about Naruto, Boruto says "Kaa-chan ni deredere shite." For some reason, the English subtitles on both Crunchyroll and Viz translated that to "He makes Mom do everything." This is particularly egregious because a more accurate translation would be "He is lovestruck towards Mom," and all of the non-English subs give a similarly faithful translation--the French subs translated it to "Il est gaga devant maman" ("He is gaga in front of Mom"), the German subs translated it to "Er himmelt Mama an" ("He adores Mom"), and the Italian subs translated it to "Fa tanto il carino con la mamma" ("He's so cute with Mom").

* In the German dub of ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'', instead of original Japanese or even English pronounciation, they use German pronounciation, with different accents and letters. Meaning, every letter "s" is now pronounced as "z", every "z" is pronounced as "ts" and every "ch" is pronounced as "sh". Meaning that Sasuke (pronounced sas-kay in English) is pronounced zaZUke (ZU being the accented part). Also, Jiraiya is pronounced Yiraya. "Sensei, Itashi [is using] amaterazu!!!"

*** It got even weirder, when Tobi enumerate the Jinchuurikis with their Bijuus, Roshi's name became suddenly "Yoton" (lava style) which is actually a Ninjutsu element.

* There was an ''Anime/AskDrRin'' subbing that had Tokiwa call himself a "LovableSexManiac". Now, ostensibly true as that may be for character description purposes, understanding Japanese, I can definitely say that he was calling himself a "[[{{Onmyodo}} shikigami]] user" instead, which makes a lot more sense.

** The Brazilian dub for the 2nd season is either this or a TranslationTrainWreck, since it used the Mexican dub as the source. The Sailor Scouts are now referred to as ''the Sailor Moons'', Moon Princess Halation got translated to ''By The Power of the Moon Princess's Tiara", [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOV3k43qTl8 note]] that the attack doesn't have anything to do with her tiara at all.

** MangaEntertainment's otherwise good translation of the OVA had an error involving the post-it notes left by Nenene Sumiregawa for Yomiko, which are seen near the beginning of the first episode. These say things such as "Clean this up. -- Nenene". However, the translators apparently didn't recognize that Nenene was supposed to be a person's name (which is understandable since she doesn't actually appear on-screen in the OVA), and interpreted it as the question-tag particle "ne" repeated three times. As a result, the on-screen translation of this note is "Clean this up! Up! Up!" (and similar things for the other notes).

* Horribly, horribly present in ''Manga/{{Hellsing}}''. From the fact that the title comes from "Van Helsing", which is only ever spelled with one 'L', to the fact that some British characters have names in Eastern order ("Seras Victoria" instead of "Victoria Ceres"), to opposite gender titles of nobility[[note]] It's actually worse than just the gender screw-up; it is strongly hinted that Integra's title is hereditary – KBE titles like "Dame" are ''never'' hereditary – thus her "proper" title should be either Baroness, Viscountess, Countess, or possibly Marchioness; regardless, she should '''''not''''' be called "Sir"[[/note]], to (most {{egregious}}ly) the fact that in the official subtitles a character whose name is [[{{Alucard}} "Dracula"]] [[SdrawkcabName reversed]] is called "Arucard". Because Bram Stoker wrote a book called ''Dracura'', apparently. The original author admitted that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote the English bits.

** 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 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").

*** The Netflix version has it worse. Along with occasional typos such as "What it that?", this version would often get the names completely wrong. For example, it referred to Piccolomon as "Picklemon" for a very long time. In the episode where they finally got it right, Zudomon inexplicably became "Cannomon", even though they had called him Zudomon in previous episodes. ''Adventure 02'' is consistent at least, but it consistently uses several dub terms ("Digivolve" instead of "evolve" and "DNA Digivolve" instead of "Jogress Evolve", for example).

** While the Mexican dub of the show is regarded as one of the best 90s anime dubs of LatAm, it has some jarring mistakes, one of the most notorious was from Ami's introduction, in that episode, Ami notes that Luna's name is the same of the satellite, pretty smart in Japanese, completely obvious and unnecessary in Spanish, made more evident when Usagi praises her for being intelligent enough to realize it.

*** In one episode, the bad one misheard "Great Moth" for "Great Mouth" and, yes, that giant moth thing was called "Great Mouth" (in Portuguese) for the rest of the episode. Weird? You have no idea how much.

** The Italian translation of the manga is a complete mess. Between [[SpellMyNameWithAnS wrong romanizations]] (Bandith Keith became "Bandit Kierce", a name that doesn't exist anywhere, and also many names that were GratuitousEnglish in Japanese were romanized in the wrong way - such as "Dynausor" instead of "Dinosaur" or "Ribaiasan" instead of "Leviathan"), [[InconsistentDub card names changing between chapters]], the translator thinking that minds and souls are the same thing (every GratuitousEnglish usage of "Mind" had a footnote translating it as "Anima", which is Italian for "Soul"), changing Yen with Euros in two random, unrelated chapters while talking about Yen in every other chapter...

* ''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 ''[[TyopOnTheCover 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.

** And then there's the ''Polish'' ''over''dub of Armada, which failed so badly that it is to this day considered the worst Polish translation of a Transformers series ''ever''. Characters would often get new names that were so ridiculous it made you think whether the translators were doing it on purpose. Example: "Hot Shot" became "Piorunus", which, when translated back into English, becomes "Lightningus".....which is just plain wrong. It even more wrong when you realize that his character has ''nothing to do with lightning whatsoever''. And to make it even worse, the translators were somehow able to make Armada's already nonsensical dialogue make ''even less sense'' at times. *coughCyclonusisnotaplanetcough*

* Before ''Armada'' and ''Energon'', ''Transformers'' suffered a particularly infamous instance of this trope. The SoBadItsGood English ''Anime/TransformersHeadmasters'' dub changed dialogue so nonsensically that you got translations like "[[CrowningMomentOfFunny Fortress Maximus has come himself]]". There were also bizarre and completely pointless name changes, like renaming Blurr "Wally" and dubbing Spike as '''SPARKLE''' of all things. The whole dub has become a minor meme in the ''Transformers'' fandom and is often considered a good example of what can happen with incompetent dubbing elsewhere.

* 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 Filmworks' 2015 redub of the original movie.

** In the MIXX magazine, Hotaru was called Jenny... for all of ''one'' page in the Dream Arc, long after her name was known and manifested as Hotaru.

** The Russian dub occasionally fell victim to this, mainly due to very obvious lack of any research on the translators' part. Probably one of the best examples: in a first season episode that featured a cat Youma, the cat in question was named (in the dub) "Red Hunter". Except... his original name was supposed to be a pun on "Rhett Butler", ''not'' "Red Battler" (whatever the translators might have heard); apparently, the massive amount of ''Gone with the Wind'' jokes in this episode was missed by the dubbing team... And you'd think the fact that the cat in question is '''light blue''' could give them a clue that something is wrong (amusingly, Luna's comment about the name not fitting was left intact in the dub...).

** When Sailor Venus introduces herself to the rest of the Senshi for the first time, one of the girls refers to her as "Sailor Five". While she ''is'' technically the fifth team member introduced, "Sailor Five" is likely a misinterpretation of "Sailor V" via Roman numerals... never mind she was constantly called Sailor V up until that scene.

** Another case of a crazy translation happened in episode 144. Tuxedo Mask, whose speeches were always given a somewhat... loose interpretation, ended his introduction by suddenly offering the listeners some "magic powder". Cue fandom jokes about what it could be and whether it could be the reason for such translation quality. [[http://www.freudsmagicpowder.com/ Really fits it]].

** The Swedish dub gives the first four generals names that, spelling aside, are mostly similar to their origin word ("Jedyte", "Neflite" and "Zoysite")... then they turn around and name Kunzite "Kunta" (the four sisters in R became Petzite, Calver, Bertesite and Kermasite, so it seems they had figured out the theme naming by then... though "Calver" still doesn't entirely fit). It also exclusively referred to Sailor V as "Sailor Five" whenever her name was spoken out loud.
** The Hungarian dub was likewise fond of terribly bizarre translations. Again, it was re-translated from the French version. One sentence became notably legendary among anime enthusiasts: in one of the episodes when Sailor Moon has just been saved by Tuxedo Mask, the dub has her reciprocating by angrily shouting "Go away, you filthy man!" While the animation, of course, still shows her being all happy. In fact, the translator has openly admitted that his (her?) French was far from good, so for the most part, the dubbing script was really just a bunch of guesswork based on the few words the translator understood.

** And inexplicably renamed Kilala "Roger", and had people falling into the malaria...
** How about one where Kikyo had her name inexplicably rendered as "Jugen"?

* [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V413_i-HGg This Mazinger Z sub]]. [[Anime/MazingerZ Tall Evil God]]. Doctor Hill. Asla. It just... it just keeps going.

* In an early episode of the ''Manga/RanmaOneHalf'' manga, there is an elaborate pun on "panda", "pan da" and the sound effect "pan". The English translation turns this into a slightly less elaborate pun on the sound effect "pop" and "I'm Ranma's pop", which got literally translated in the French version to the pun-less "Je suis le père de Ranma, pigé?" (in English: "I am Ranma's dad, got it?"). What the...
* ''{{LightNovel/Slayers}}'' examples...

** Their dub of ''[[Anime/MobileFighterGGundam G Gundam]]'' and ''[[Anime/AfterWarGundamX Gundam X]]'' is quite worse in translating the names of characters. And the voice actor of Heero Yuy is the same as Garrod Ran and Chibodee Crocket!

* The episode summaries on the back of the European releases of ''Anime/EurekaSeven'' seem to have been written by someone whose primary language is not English. Or they forgot to proofread them. The worst ones:
** For episode 11, the summary is "Whilst suffer from headaches, the link between Eureka and the Nirvash seems to be weakening. In the meantime, the Gekko-Go prepares to meet the mysterious thing, the Coralian". Internet translation engine, anyone?
** In the case of episode 21 the second sentence reads "Meanwhile aboard the Gekko-Go, Talho tells the crew some shocking revelations, [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment that will shock everyone]]..."

** The Spanish dub of ''Frontier'' was okay, some voices too feminine and no translation of the text at the end making some of it's meaning to scare go away as Spanish kids can't read japanese. But the dub of Zephyrmon takes the cake, being dubbed by a man with BadassBaritone...

*** This is an issue with the English dub, too. It obviously uses the (usually expertly done) name localizations from the games, but doesn't always understand why the game localized it the way it did, and what the pun is supposed to be, thus screwing up the pronunciation. Thus, the tiny rock Pokemon that resembles a bonsai tree in a flowerpot, named "Usohachi" (from "uso" (=fake) and "hachi" (=flowerpot)) in the original, got cleverly localized to "Bonsly" in the games (from "bonsai", "sly" and "lie")... and the dub goes ahead and pronounces it "Bon-slee".
*** The pronounce issue was made worst after the release of ''Pokédex 3D Pro'', where Pokémon names are pronounced out loud, and those pronounciations became the official Italian ones... often replacing correct pronounces with wrong ones. Good examples are Charmeleon, Muk and Wobbuffet: Until 2013 were pronounced "Char-ME-lee-on", "Muck" and "WOB-bah-fett", now are pronounced "Char-MAY-leon", "Mook" and "Wob-BOO-fett".

* The brazilian dub of ''Pokémon'' translated String Shot as "Tiro de Estilingue", which means Sling Shot.

** Ever wondered why the Pokémon League championships 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 participants battle each other, it's clear that that's not the intended meaning here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as Pokémon League Conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

* The English translation of the second part of ''Manga/CountCain'', titled ''Godchild'', actually gets the '''title''' wrong! When, towards the end of the story, the significance of the title is finally explained, it's clear from the context that it ought to be translated as ''Grandchild''. Elsewhere in the manga, the translation is quite poor, with odd decisions such as pocket watches being referred to in dialogue as "clocks".

* Sentai's subtitle for episode 20 of ''Literature/FromTheNewWorld'', right at the beginning, translates "Aitsu da yo" ("It's them," or in context "It's the [[spoiler:ogre]]") as... [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment "It's it."]] In addition to being grammatically bizarre, that phrase happens to be [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s-It_Ice_Cream a brand of ice cream sandwich.]] The dub does a better job, translating it as "It's coming."

*** Which is understandable, since the most suitable-sounding translation ("March of the Titans") is already the name of a well-known, ''quite'' racist book.

*** 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. This name was also used in FUNimation's edited English dub for religious censorship reasons.

** 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 Creator/FUNimation.

* A Chinese bootleg version ''[[Anime/NeonGensisEvangelion End of Evangelion]]'' that was floating around on Website/YouTube and other video streaming sites, had attached an English fansub, which were clearly very literally translated, leading to several hilarious examples of English that while grammatically sensible, was otherwise complete nonsense. Most notably, is when Asuka confronts Shinji with the line "I know about your jerk-off fantasies of me." In the original Japanese, Asuka actually uses the idiomatic phrase "I know you've been using me as a side dish." In Japanese lingo, "using something as a side dish" is an expression for using something or someone for one's erotic fantasies, but with the underlying implication that the person using the "side dish" is too scared to actually act on their feelings. In the fansub, however, the line comes out as "I know you only think of me as food!"

* The English dub: Ever wondered why the Pokémon League championships 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 participants battle each other, it's clear that that's not the intended meaning here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as Pokémon League Conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

* The English dub: Ever wondered why the Pokémon League championships 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 meaning here. Unfortunately, the dubbers couldn't be bothered to apply some context, so they translated it as Pokémon League Conference, and never bothered correcting it in later seasons.

** At an anime convention, Taliesin Jaffe (ADR director and scriptwriter of the English dub) addressed the "Arucard" issue. They knew "Alucard" was correct, but the Japanese licensors insisted that they use "Arucard" in the subtitles on the grounds that "It's Dracura backwards". Cue facepalm from the localizers.

** The Swedish dub gives the first four generals names that, spelling aside, are mostly similar to their origin word ("Jedyte", "Neflite" and "Zoysite")... then they turn around and name Kunzite "Kunta" (the four sisters in R became Petzite, Calver, Bertesite and Kermasite, so it seems they had figured out the theme naming by then... though "Calver" still doesn't entirely fit).

* The ''VisualNovel/DanganRonpa'' anime dub has a particularly bad example where, in the first episode, Makoto 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. His mother also calls him "Naegi" instead of "Makoto" as in the original Japanese, and referring to another family member by their surname makes very little sense.