History BlindIdiotTranslation / TableTopGames

** Italian translations have some goofs here and there, like in ''Magic'' above. V-Tiger Jet's first print had a mention of dogfight in its flavor text translated as it referred to literal dog fighting (with dogs). The error was fixed as soon as the card was printed in another set. An even more blatant error came with Naturia Eggplant, whose name was interpreted as some kind of fusion between a plant and an egg rather than the actual vegetable.

Competition from the face to the office (Tabletop Games)

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' gives us an InUniverse example. The Space Wolves Space Marine chapter are so named because somebody in the Imperial bureaucracy screwed up his translation of "Vlka Fenryka", which actually means "Wolves of Fenris". Likewise their rank "jarl" got mangled into "Wolf Lord". It's not clear if the dozens of other terms using the "wolf x" convention are also a case of this... or the explanation for it. Another Fenris example comes up in a Horus Heresy novel where a daemon fails to use IKnowYourTrueName powers on the marine named "Bjorn" because everyone had been mistakenly calling him the teanslated-out "Bear" the whole time.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' gives us an InUniverse example. The Space Wolves Space Marine chapter are so named because somebody in the Imperial bureaucracy screwed up his translation of "Vlka Fenryka", which actually means "Wolves of Fenris". Likewise their rank "jarl" got mangled into "Wolf Lord". It's not clear if the dozens of other terms using the "wolf x" convention are also a case of this... or the explanation for it.

** The Dragonmaid archetype revolves around monsters depicted as female domestic workers who can transform into dragons. The French translation of this archetype, "Dragonirène", seems to have misunderstood the "-maid" part of the name and instead of referencing domestic workers, it choose to reference mermaids[[note]]The french word for "mermaid" is "sirène"[[/note]].

*** Many cards had GratuitousEnglish names in Japan, which were inconsistently either left the same ("Sparks" is still "Sparks"), spiced up ("Cyclone" to "Mystical Space Typhoon"), or turned into GratuitousJapanese ("Fireball" to "Hinotama"). Irritating for the purists, but there's a logic and intent to it... and then there's "Hurricane" being turned into "Giant Trunade." No, the Japanese word for "hurricane" is not "trunade." The nearest anyone's been able to guess is that it's an attempt to transliterate a heavily-accented Japanese pronunciation of the English word "tornado", never mind that there actually ''is'' a Japanese word for "tornado."

*** Many cards had GratuitousEnglish names in Japan, which were inconsistently either left the same, spiced up ("Cyclone" to "Mystical Space Typhoon"), or turned into GratuitousJapanese ("Fireball" to "Hinotama"). Irritating for the translators, but there's a logic and intent to it... and then there's "Hurricane" being turned into "Giant Trunade." No, the Japanese word for "hurricane" is not "trunade." The nearest anyone's been able to guess is that it's an attempt to transliterate a heavily-accented Japanese pronunciation of the English word "tornado", never mind that there actually ''is'' a Japanese word for "tornado."

** And then the is the case of the "Ant Eating Anteater", who became an "Ameisenfressender Ameisenbär". This would actually be a translation of "Ant-eating Anteater", and thus reverses the roles once again.

** Sometimes card names that were originally in English get mangled due to incorrect interpretation of the katakana. For example, the card known as Buster Rancher in the English version is clearly supposed to be Buster ''Launcher'' (Basutā Ranchā in katakana), and a lot of cards include the word "Des" (which is not a word in English at all), which anyone with even a passing knowledge of katakana could tell you is meant to be "Death". (Okay, so NeverSayDie might have been in effect, but it would have been better to change it to something else rather than making up nonsense words.) Other times, the name changes are just bizarre (Revival Slime getting changed to Revival Jam, despite the fact that the monster is blue and looks nothing like jam at all) not to mention inconsistent (Slime Zōshokuro - literally Slime Breeder Reactor - got translated to Jam Breeding Machine to match the change of Revival Slime to Revival Jam, but the tokens it produces are still called Slime Tokens rather than Jam Tokens).

** The spanish translations fall into this an awful lot of times. There a ton of examples. It seems the spanish translator for "Garbage Lord" couldn't even properly read the name and ended up translating the card's name as "Carga de Porquería" (Garbage LOAD), "The Tricky" was translated as "El Díficil" (made worse by the fact that the anime properly translated it as "El Tramposo"), "Qliphort Shell" as "Concha Qlifuerte" ("shell" as in computing shell doesn't have a translation in spanish to begin with). Sometimes you wonder if the translator is an actual human being and not a machine, thanks to cards like "Dian Keto, el Señora de la Curación" and "El Mago Blanco Pikeru" that use a male pronoun to refer to clearly female cards. This extends to entire archetypes too; "Fabled" was translated as "Fabuloso"... when the proper translation is along the lines of "Legendary" or "Mythical". And in its worst form affects entire mechanics; "Tuner", something that in spanish is known as "Afinador" is somehow translated into... "Cantante" (Singer). How the translator made the jump from someone that tunes musical instruments to someone that sings music is a mystery.

** Italian translations have some goofs here and there, like in ''Magic'' above. V-Tiger Jet's first print had a mention of dogfight in its flavor text translated as it referred to dog fighting (necause you know, everyone brings a fighter jet in a fight between dogs). The error was fixed as soon as the card was printed in another set. An even more blatant error came with Naturia Eggplant, whose name was interpreted as some kind of fusion between a plant and an egg rather than the actual vegetable.