History BlindIdiotTranslation / LiveActionTv

* The German dub of ''Series/StargateSG1'' translated the iconic "[[Franchise/TheSimpsons Burns]] as Goa'uld" line literally, as "brennt wie Goa'uld" which means "burning like Goa'uld". Not only is the joke lost, the conversion refers to "animated characters" after it regardless, which of course makes no sense by then.

** In another example, from something a long time ago, the word in the subtitle was "defenestrate". The Deaf actress signed literally, "open-window, throw-out". So, "throw out the window" would have been much better than "defenestrate". Unless a Deaf person spelled out D-E-F-E-N-E-S-T-R-A-T-E, that subtitle would almost never be right.

* In one episode of ''Series/TheXFiles'', the Dutch subtitles translate Cancer Man as "Kreeftman" (Lobster Man). However, this can be considered an InvertedTrope. Although the translation is weird from an English point of view, it's actually a smart translation that keeps cultural differences into account. Calling the man Kanker Man would change the entire setting and feelings about the man, while this translation prevents such confusion: "Kanker" (cancer) is used as a swear word in Dutch, one so bad that [[AcceptableTargets even the Dutch]] [[EvenEvilHasStandards hesitate to use it]]. So instead of using "cancer the disease", they used "Cancer the Zodiac sign", which is "kreeft", also meaning "lobster".

** Whoever wrote the Finnish subtitles for "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis" must not have known that the phrase "big whoop" is a sarcastic expression of excitement and has nothing to do with ass-whooping.

** In another episode, when Sheldon and the others are talking about ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'', they translated all the titles into Italian. There are two obvious problems with this: first, the titles of the Zelda games were never translated into Italian. Second, ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess Twilight Princess]]'' was translated as "La principessa di Twilight"... as in "The princess of ''Literature/{{Twilight}}''", rather then "La principessa del crepuscolo", which is the proper translation of the moniker used in the Italian translation of the game itself.

* ''Series/TheKingsWoman'': The quality of the [=YouTube=] subtitles dramatically deteriorates in episodes thirty-five and thirty-six. It's almost incomprehensible, and includes gems like translating "Qin" as "South Korea" and "寡人/''guǎ rén''"[[note]]first-person pronoun a ruler uses to refer to himself[[/note]] as "the widow". Then there are the references to "Prince Edward", which are utterly inexplicable and make you wonder if the translator thought they were subtitling a show about British history.

** Poor translation in the original English version: in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E10TheDoctorDances "The Doctor Dances"]] a German bomb is labelled "Schlechter Wolf", which is an attempt to translate [[ArcWords "Bad Wolf"]] into German. "Schlechter" means "bad" as in "poor-quality" or "mouldy", the correct German translation would be "Böser Wolf". Then again, the ArcWords were planted throughout by [[spoiler: a working-class RealityWarper]] who was not a native German-speaker.
*** It happened in Norwegian in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E13Doomsday "Doomsday"]]: A location's name is given in Norwegian as "Dårlig Ulv Stranden", which is translated into English as "Bad Wolf Bay". "Dårlig", like "Schlechter" before it, means "bad" in the sense of "faulty" or "broken". And "Stranden" means "beach", one that's easy to cut some slack for seeing as that is a beach. It would be hard to mishear "Ond" as "Dalek", as the Doctor does "Dårlig".
** The [[TitleDrop "Doctor Who?"]] questions are usually translated in the French dub as "Docteur Qui ?", which loses the original joke since the show is still called "Doctor Who", and sounds rather weird in French (a French person would rather ask "Docteur Comment ?"[[note]]"Doctor How?"[[/note]] or "Docteur Quoi ?"[[note]]"Doctor What?"[[/note]]).

* The German dub of {{Series/Firefly}} had some mistakes, but one of the more amusing ones is Wash suggesting to circumvent the Zäune and sell the stolen medicine directly to the people. Yes, Zäune means fences - but fences as in "garden fences" rather than "people who buy stolen goods". The same episode botched Wash's "Hey, I've been in a firefight before. [Pauses] Well, I was in a fire. [Pauses] Actually, I was fired, from a fry cook opportunity." [[InflationaryDialogue Deflationary Dialogue]].

* ''Series/HomeAndAway's'' Norwegian sub is badly stricken with this, when "someone's boyfriend", referring to one of the present character's boyfriends, get changed to "[absent character]'s new friend"... when that character hasn't even mentioned getting any new friends for ages, you really start wondering about whether or not the translators pay any attention to the plot whatsoever, they most likely don't as other horrible, horrible instances will prove to you.
* In a ''Series/{{House}}'' episode online with Spanish subtitles, Dr Cameron describes a wound as "pus-y", i.e. oozing pus; the subtitles said the wound was a vagina. While the word is spelled the same ("pussy") and pronounced differently, one would have thought the ''context'' would have clued them in.

* In a ''Series/HowItsMade'' episode we are shown the production process for tortilla chips, including the adding of lime (as the chalky powder used in masonry, called ''calce'' in Italian) to cornmeal in order to obtain nixtamalised masa dough. The Italian translator mistook that for the ''citrus fruit'' (which is called ''lime'' like in English).
* During one episode in the Brazilian dubbing of ''iCarly'', the translators didn't translate Spencer's best friend name, Socko (called ''"Meião"'', literally "Big Sock", in all other episodes). Carly also used the female article ''"a"'' when mentioning him.

* Another infamous example by Hong Kong Subs was ''Series/KamenRiderRyuki'', in which in one episode, someone said, "Don't Molest the Lawyer". This too became a minor meme within the fandom.

* In an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrder'', there was a case being investigated when it links to a kid who got ''Videogame/CrashBandicoot1996'' as a present. (ItMakesSenseInContext). Anyway, the Latin-American Spanish translators didn't know the franchise's name. So, in the subtitles, when they say "Crash Bandicoot" it was translated as... "El Canguro que Choca" (literally, "[[TranslationTrainWreck The Crashing Kangaroo]]"). Let's see just how wrong this is on many levels.

* In the Italian dub of ''Series/LifeOnMars2006'' the idiom ''he hates your guts'' got translated literally, as if the detective had issues with the leading character's digestive trait.

*** Examples: "Klingon" became "Klingoon" (why?!), "Warp" became "Krommingssnelheid" (good for scrabble!), among a few of the more memorable idiotic translations.

** ''Franchise/StarTrek'' sometimes suffers from this even in the original English - regarding the *Klingon* dialogue. The Klingon language is rightly celebrated for being a fairly good attempt at a plausible alien language, as the grammar was devised by an actual linguist, Marc Okrand, who went out of his way to make it very different from Human languages and especially different from English. Unfortunately this meant that later Trek writers have had great difficulty making sense of Okrand's dictionary and have often opted for the BlindIdiotTranslation option instead. For example translating "you honor me" as ''[=SoH=] batlh jI' '' (sic), which literally means something more like "I am an honor you are" (the correct Klingon would be ''choquvmoH''). Ronald D. Moore, the writer credited with creating much of the Klingon culture seen in the Next Generation era, has admitted to finding the original Klingon dictionary "cumbersome" and that he preferred to make up words as he went along instead.

* It takes ''Series/TheStrain'' nearly 2 seasons before the viewers get to see the long awaited [[MacGuffin Occido Lumen]]. It has an impressive silver binding, beautiful images, a very lovely [[ForeignLookingFont pseudo-medieval script]] and sentences like "Sie wurde gesagt, um schwangere Frauen aufmerksam zu beobachten, vor allem, wenn sie in den Arbeitsmarkt ging". The English original would have been something like "She (Lilith) was said to watch pregnant women attentively, especially when they went into labor". The German sentence actually says "... when they went into the job market" (plus some mangled grammar).

* In one episode of ''Series/TheXFiles'', the Dutch subtitles translate Cancer Man as "Kreeftman" (Lobster Man). However, this can be considered an InvertedTrope. Although the translation is weird from an English point of view, it's actually a smart translation that keeps cultural differences into account. Calling the man Kanker Man would change the entire setting and feelings about the man, while this translation prevents such confusion: "kanker" (cancer) is used as a swear word in Dutch, one so bad that [[AcceptableTargets even the Dutch]] [[EvenEvilHasStandards hesitate to use it]]. So instead of using "cancer the disease", they used "Cancer the Zodiac sign", which is "kreeft", also meaning "lobster".

* ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000:

* In season 24, episode 10 of ''Series/{{Pointless}}'', Alexander mentions adding 250 pounds to the jackpot. The Norwegian translator thought he was going for the mass unit and translated it as "113 kg". Another episode had "literary Patricias" translated as "literary patriarchs".

* ''Series/RuyisRoyalLoveInThePalace'': The YouTube subtitles, although coherent, occasionally sound stilted and unnatural. Example: "I want to spectate with you...".

* In season 24, episode 10 of ''Series/{{Pointless}}'', Alexander mentions adding 250 pounds to the jackpot. The Norwegian translator thought he was going for the mass unit and translated it as "113 kg".

*** In the original series, "Return fire" is translated at least once as "Retournez le feu", which is the literal translation, and means "Flip the fire over". A better translation would be "Ripostez".

*** It happened in Norwegian in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E13Doomsday "Doomsday"]]: A location's name is given in Norwegian as "Dårlig Ulv Stranden", which is translated into English as "Bad Wolf Bay". "Dårlig", like "Schlechter" before it, means "bad" in the sense of "faulty" or "broken". And "Stranden" means "beach", one that's easy to cut some slack for seeing as that is a beach.

* The Hungarian dubbing (or rather voice-over) of ''Series/TopGear'' borderlines TranslationTrainWreck, with the translator rendering most of the dialog word-for-word. While the car reviews and the challenges usually end up being at least a bit incomprehensible, the guest star segments are virtually mangled. What more, if the translator doesn't know what a word or expression means, he sometimes simply omits it, or worse, actually leaves them in English. Also? He isn't well-versed in this whole car stuff either.

* The Hungarian voiceover of ''Series/Wipeout2008'' changed its translator after the first few seasons, leading to almost all of the show's verbal humor being lost. For example, John Henson once joked that their obstacle course is "kind of a dump". This was translated as "it's a kind of landfill". Other times, jokes are even replaced with straight, boring commentary.

* Shout Factory's in-house translations for the Super Sentai And Kamen Rider Franchise's (as well as the series showcased on their TokuSHOUTtsu service) have been called out for Years as being this, to the point fansubs for what they've licensed are religiously preferred by the Tokusatsu communities despite the official distribution of them; and the fan translators have made long post-chains accounting to this and Shout's numerous errors/mistranslations/incorrect contextualization of content and scenes to a greater excess than you can pin on any of the longer-existing fansub groups. Of their releases to date, only the translation Of the series GoGoV is considered superior to any existing fansub on it, whereas Ohranger's is viewed as on-par with the prior fansub. Ironically, the grand majority of the failures of Shout Factory's subs for these (and also their Anime set releases like Transformers and Medabots) is their admitted-to-by-the-staff-on-these-releases-themselves consistent refusal to proof their own work until it is too late to make changes and fix errors, wherein their screwups are then Gaslit. Especially egregious, as OTHER Companies that have taken on translation projects for series in the genre, and both Kraken releasing with their Garo releases AND Discotek with their import of the series Juspion DID actually ask for and check their work against existing fansubs to make sure they were releasing the best possible versions they could.
** this is also exasperated by the generally poor-make of these releases, where video quality of every episode is notoriously terrible due to the means of compression they utilized on the masters; and the general obliviousness to the content the translators are experiencing. Including content from the series' respective Movies that Shout factory DID not license (and they can thus be sued for using by the owner of the properties, Toei) making it into their packaging and promotional art.

* ''Series/{{Guardian}}'': The quality of the [=YouTube=] subtitles ranges from "relatively good" to "downright incomprehensible". The first episode alone contains gems like "You must saw the corpse" and "you has already find something useful".

** The [[TitleDrop "Doctor Who?"]] questions are usually translated in the French dub as "Docteur Qui ?", which loses the original joke and sounds rather weird in French (a French person would rather ask "Docteur Comment ?"[[note]]"Doctor How?"[[/note]] or "Docteur Quoi ?"[[note]]"Doctor What?"[[/note]]).