History BlindIdiotTranslation / Videogames

* ''VideoGame/ChantsOfSennar'' does this in-universe given that it's all about languages. The game won't make any attempt to make sentences grammatically correct in English if the player hasn't discovered the meaning of every single word within it, instead simply translating all the known words as listed.

---> Cecily: "It looks like we'll make it back safe... how about some toast when we get back home?"\\
Mission title: "Peace Singing Singstress"\\

* The Italian version of the adventure game ''Cruise for a Corpse''. Creator/{{Delphine Software|International}} (which was a ''French'' company) didn't hire professional translators and handled translation by itself - the results have to be seen to be believed. For instance, the title was translated as "Crociata per un cadavere", which means "''CRUSADE'' (no, I'm not joking) for a corpse", with "for" meaning "in favor of"! Add to that dialogue translations ranging from hilariously bad to completely nonsensical and you've got one hell of an unplayable game version - most of the time you can hardly understand what people are telling you.

** The 3D games and the anime caused some disconnect between what the attack looked like and what the not-entirely-accurate English translation called it. Rain Dance is never going to be portrayed as a dance because its original name, Ama-goi, means "Rain Prayer" or more literally "praying for rain", and Aerial Ace was named after the famous sword strike ''Swallow Reversal / Tsubame Gaeshi'', and is a Flying move JustForPun, but has nothing to do with flying and is widely available on non-winged Pokémon. Newer games have more closely translated attack names presumably for this reason.

* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'': In every other piece of ''Fate'' media, Saber's true name is translated as "Artoria" ([[SpellMyNameWithAnS though sometimes it's written "Arturia" instead]]). It's a feminine version of "Artorius," and is a real, though old and rare, name. ''Grand Order'' for some reason insists on using "Altria," which is literally what you get when you put the Japanese version of her name into Google Translate. Made worse by connotations - Altria is the name of the parent company of Philip Morris Tobacco, [[SmokingIsNotCool not exactly the impression you want for a character known for purity and nobility]].

* You'd think the sun played an important role in ''VideoGame/{{Solatorobo}}'' based on the title, but no. It's actually supposed to be "[[JapaneseRanguage soRa (sky, as everyone lives on floating islands)]] to (and, pronounced "tow") robo (robot(s), obviously)."

* ''VideoGame/DarkChronicle'' has a Photo Idea named "Stand", which is obtained by taking a photo of a desk lamp. This is especially bizarre, since there's also a Photo Idea named "Light" which can be obtained by taking a photo of any other electric light. In Japanese, the term for desk lamp is "denki kigu", which literally translates as "electric stand".

* The intro to ''Wild Riders'' has one of the playable characters proudly boast that he's "no match for anyone". Implicitly the voice actor thought it meant the same thing as "no one is a match for me!".

* ''VideoGame/TwentyTwentySeven'' had this in the English version of the mod, since it was originally in Russian.

* ''Beatmania IIDX'':

** The ability 'Trace' is translated as 'Fährte' as in traces left by animals, traces of blood, what have you. Yet it copies the opponent's ability. They translated the description correctly. The translator(s) might (not) have wondered why the ability and its description do not match.

* There's a similarly bad one in the German ''Pokémon'' game translations: the move "Pound" is translated as "Pfund" (the currency or weight). There actually is a German equivalent for this - "jemandem ein Pfund geben" means to sock somebody. It's not exactly standard German, though

** The attack Judgement was translated in Germany to "Urteilskraft", either meaning "power of judgement" or "reasoning powers". Would have avoided confusion if they had chosen "Urteil" (literal translation of judgement).

* The Spanish version of ''[[VideoGame/{{Contra}} Contra: Shattered Soldier]]'' translates the game's "hit rate" indicator as ''taza de velocidad'' (speed cup). Putting aside the obvious misspelling of ''tasa'' (rate) into ''taza'' (cup), ''tasa de velocidad'' (speed rate) would still be an incorrect translation, as the hit rate shows the number of unique targets in each stage that the player has destroyed, not how fast they were going. Thus, a correct translation would've been ''tasa de destrucción''.

** ''VideoGame/PuLiRuLa'' is full of such phrases as "That town is so head that no persons can live in." Then again, considering how [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs whacked-out]] the game is in general, it's not surprising that not much of the dialogue makes any logical sense.

** With such "gems" as "Defeat DRAGON? if so, teach you" and "DEATH god has key to neighbor," [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs one wonders what the hell they were on]].

** One bit of FlavorText in the [[HornyVikings Norscan]] tech tree mentions how "you plundered the maps, chests and logs" of the [[GhostPirate Vampire Coast]]. The only problem? "Logs" was translated as "bûches", the wood you put in the fireplace.
** Thorek Ironbrow's opening speech when starting a Vortex campaign has him mention the "blasted raki" that oppose him. The translation team interpreted it as "exploded Skaven" (which, considering it's the [[MadScientist Skaven]], wouldn't even be too out-of-character for them) rather than the "[expletive] raki". Worse, the "Lost vault of the Dawi" he's searching for has been translated in nearly all the mission and campaign texts as the lost ''Arch'', only the final campaign text giving the more accurate "lost sacred chamber".

** On a more serious note, the early English translations of the games themselves. Since most don't have official ones and are instead fanmade (given ZUN prefers to leave the matter to the fans), during early period of the series overseas, the translation could veer into this. Specifically, since the patches were pre-made and not always made by someone with knowledge of Japanese, quality could be... questionable, and the static patches were hard to update. This ranged from small mistakes like poor choice of words that didn't alter the meaning too much, to serious mistakes like completely changing or losing the meaning of a sentence (or just straight up making up sentences ''or entire paragraphs''). The creation of more dynamic patch system created by the [[https://www.thpatch.net/wiki/Touhou_Patch_Center:Download THCRAP]], quality control of patches has been made easier, making it easier to correct any cases of this. Perhaps the most notable example of this is how Cirno's name should actually be transliterated as Chirno (and is pronounced as such), [[GrandfatherClause but the incorrect spelling has since been ingrained into everyone's mind so much, that nobody really bothers using the correct spelling.]]

* The French subtitles of ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2'' are horribly mangled. "Le prototype est resté en vie et a placé la station sur une course de collision course de collision avec la planète !", which roughly translates as "The prototype has stayed alive and located the station on a collision race collision race with the planet !". And yes, they ''did'' repeat "course de collision".

* The Italian instructions for the original ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog1'' called the main character "the Sonic" all the time.

* ''VideoGame/WarThunder'', a game primarily developed by Russian and other Slavic speakers, has had amongst other errors an obviously machine-translated description of naval damage control as "the struggle for vitality", which has since been corrected. An awkward phrase that still persists is the description of battle task requirements of requiring "not less" than a certain quantity of, for example, units destroyed, very likely a literal translation of "не менее/''nye meneye''" from Russian.
** The first jet aircraft for the Japanese was initially translated as ''Kitsuka'' instead of ''Kikka'', with the translator mistaking the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokuon sokuon]] (which marks a double consonant) as a regular ''tsu''.

* A rather egregious case occurred in the ''Revelation'' map of ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyZombies''. In general, the game's French translations range from [[SoOkayItsAverage acceptable]] to [[NoDubForYou outright absent]] (some of the radios on the map ''do not have any audio file whatsoever, not even untranslated English ones''), but on this map there was an object named "Al's cap", 'Al' being the nickname of ''Mob of the Dead'' playable character Albert Arlington. Except, the translation team confused the lowercase "L" for an uppercase "i", and thus mistook "'''AL'''(bert)'s cap" as "'''A'''(rticifical) '''I'''(ntelligence)'s cap", which lead to them translating the 'acronym' to its french version and thus giving "IA's cap", confusing quite a few players.

* For that matter, the "standard" translation for the ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' games is an example too.

* In ''VideoGame/{{The Sims 2}}'', you are given the option to "Fire" a nanny if you want to. In an early version, however, it was translated in Finnish as "Ammu", which means "''[[DisproportionateRetribution Shoot]]''". One can only imagine the disappointent of the players who expected their sim to pull out a gun on the offending nanny...

** For the Swedish translation the first line was slightly changed, which in turn [[LostInTranslation ruined the foot joke completly]]:

* The SEA version of the MMORPG ''VideoGame/DragonNest'' has some very inconsistent and sometimes word for word translations into english. While [[https://i.imgur.com/XPsPjFn.jpg it can be slightly funny in the beginning]], at some point the quest texts start turning into gibberish. Some cutscenes also have completely different lines in the subtitles than the voiced lines.

** A few quests, and the chapters 8, 9, and Extra Chapter 1 of the main story are actually left untranslated (though the cutscenes have english subtitles). But since this version of the game uses the English standard of characters, [[https://i.imgur.com/EivQF2O.jpg all the text turns into squares,]] except for the player's name and the lines where the player must pick an answer.

*** On top of this, some lines were accidentally ''duplicated'' and assigned to different characters. A localiser then combed through the dialogue and played with it to give each character their distinctive 'voice'. The results are mystifying:

** During the WholeEpisodeFlashback to Nibelheim, the player can examine Tifa's dresser to obtain her underwear, which are labelled as ちょっと背伸びぱんつ. 背伸び, literally translating to "back-stretching", is an idiom meant to suggest Tifa wore underwear intended for slightly older women to seem more "grown-up." The localization, working off this literal translation, rendered it as "Orthopedic Underwear", baffingly implying Tifa was wearing underwear that doubled as a spinal applicance.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFight'' suffered from nonsensical names that were supposed to be something else. In particular, mixups with the katakana for "to" and "do" (exactly the same except for two little marks) ''and'' the translator never knowing for sure whether it was supposed to mean "to/do" or "t/d". As a result, we got "Bred" (Bret), "Dug" (Doug), "Andore" (Andre), "Simons" (Simon), "El Gado" (El Gato), "Rolento" (Laurent), and worst of all, "Edi.E" (Eddie). And of course, the SNES-only sequel continued the tradition with "Mic" (Mick), "Eliot" (Elliot), "Jony" (Jonny), "Elick" (Erick), and "Schot" (Scott...whoever came up with that one ''should'' be schot). "Rolento" got changed to "Rolent", which of course did not improve matters one tiny bit.

* Done intentionally in ''VideoGame/{{Control}}'', to make [[AlmightyJanitor Ahti]] come accross as ''really'' weird. He uses Finnish expressions and idioms very often, but translates them literally into English (or any language you're playing the game on) making them come across as nonsensical (for example, he at one points asks you to burn things "to a reindeer, not a moose", which is a "Dad Joke" in Finnish, where the words for "ashes" and "reindeer" are homophones, but makes no sense in any other language).

* ''VideoGame/TotalWarWarhammer'' and its sequels have translation work that is, if not particularly great, generally competent, which makes the mistakes all the more visible.

** Admittedly, among their 3 opening titles, [[SurprisinglyGoodEnglish there is one well-translated game]] but at the same time, it was the worst game of them, content-wise. It ''still'' didn't do much help.

*** Additionally, the translators accidentally filled in the blanks, meaning Tellah was Edward/Gilbert's father. Seeing how the whole "spoony bard" incident [[IncestSubtext woudn't make any sense]], the [=PS1=] versions and onward fixed this error.

* ''VideoGame/GoldenSun'' hilariously translated several attacks wrongly. Most of these ("Death Size" ({{S|inisterScythe}}cythe)", the Blessing (Breath) attacks) were fixed in ''The Lost Age''... only for confusion to hit Ulmuch (Hsu) (the translators had apparently forgotten his DubNameChange) and Dullahan's "Formina Sage" (Fulminous Edge) attack.