And then there is Ivar Combrinck, the ultimate blind idiot translator, who single-handedly ruined The Simpsons, Futurama and Family Guy for German audiences.
"Don't Fear the Roofer" has Stephen Hawking's explanation about having discovered "a tear in the fabric of space-time" translated as "Träne" (as in teardrop) instead of "Riss".
After a victory by the Springfield Isotopes, Homer barges into Moe's bar and proclaims "Isotopes rule!". Mr. Combrinck translates this as "Isotopen-Spielregel" ("Spielregel" is the literal translation of "rule" as in "the rules of the game").
In the same episode, the "Game of Lent" (Lent being the Christian festivity) is translated as "Das Leihhaus-Spiel" ("The Pawn Shop Game"). "Leihen" is the German word for "to lend".
Some jokes however are simply difficult to translate. A good example is when in one Simpsons episode Bart makes a joke about buttocks (butts) towards his new girlfriends parents. When kicked out of the house he tries to excuse himself by saying "but" which sounds just like butt. In the German "buttocks" means "Hintern" while "but" means "aber". Since it's impossible to translate they just went with Bart saying "aber Hinter Hinter Hinter Hinter...".
Strangely enough, the Norwegian or Swedish translator (the exact same errors are often present in both translations) of The Simpsons often gets the names wrong, resulting in everything from minor oddities such as Ben Flanders and Crusty McClown, to weirder ones like Mark Grimby (Mayor Quimby). One of the worst (non-name) errors made by the translator is mishearing "Percadine addiction" as "perky Diane Dixon". Obviously, the translator is just casually listening to whatever he's supposed to translate, not knowing anything about the series itself.
A particularly hilarious/stupid example occurs in one episode, where Matt Groening made a short appearance. The original dialogue was something along the lines of "Look, it's Matt Groening, Creator of Futurama! Could you sign my Bender doll?" It came out of mr. Translator as something along the lines of "Look, it's Matt Greening, creator of Futurama! Could you sign my transvestite doll?" Slightly understandable, as "bender" is a slang term for a transvestite, but still...
Some references in the French dub aren't translated at all, we get horrors such as calling Ecuador (the country) Ecuador and not Équateur, its proper French name, or calling Waldo Waldo, and not Charlie (which is the name everyone knows in France). These instances are pretty annoying, given the fact that the French dub of The Simpsons is overall awesome.
Of course, The Simpsonslampshades the Trope a lot. The best example is the "Mr. Sparkle commercial", with such gems as "I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?" "Get out of my way, all of you! This is no place for loafing! Join me or die, can you do any less?" "For lucky best wash, use Mr. Sparkle."
The Finnish subtitles for one episode of The Simpsons translated Kang and Kodos as "Kag" and "Cordos" respectively.
A bootleg Russian translation of Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was full of hilarious mistakes. "Great elven kings" was mistaken for "Great eleven kings"; "To Helm's Deep!" became something akin to "Let's put on our helmets a bit deeper!". Also, Sauron was consistently called "Prince of Darkness".
Then we have the Mexican Spanish translator for Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, who translated Tails as a FEMALE CHARACTER. To this day, most non-gamers that grew up during the 90's in Spanish-speaking American countries still believe Tails (or Colitas) to be female. Additionally, Tails's real name (which he claimed he disliked in the cartoon) is Miles Prower. In the Spanish translation? Bibi Gavilán (Bibi Sparrowhawk).
While mistaking Tails for a girl is a bit unforgivable, changing the English names of fictional characters to more Hispanic-sounding names is actually a common practice in some parts of Spanish-speaking America. (In Mexico it was required by law for a while.) For example, Bruce Wayne's name was changed to Bruno Díaz.
In Spain, however, Tails is actually MALE and keeps his English name.
In an episode of Phineas and Ferb, Doofenshmirtz talks about how he likes to give people nicknames and mentions that his nickname for Perry the Platypus is Mr. Duckbillface. In the Norwegian version of that episode, this is translated as "Ande-regnings-tryne". Apparently the translator somehow failed to realize that "bill" in this context referred to... Well, a duck's bill, and so the bill part got translated as the kind of bill you have to pay.
The Brazilian dubbing of an episode of The Simpsons translated "I miss America" as "I am Miss America".
The German Star Wars: The Clone Wars dub of "Duchess of Mandalore" had Dooku say "I will send an assassin to Coruscant", while Pre Viszla is seen to send him out IN THE SAME MOMENT.
The Simpsons in Hungarian is comperable to the dubs described above. Name translations tend to change within the same episode, sometimes within mere seconds.
The BIONICLE movies, also in Hungarian. Tenses are constantly varied no matter what the original dialog said (or what's on screen), the translator made the words "duty", "destiny", "responsibility" and "task" interchangeable, and shoehorned the word "destroy" into the dialog as many times as possible (in place of "defeat", "strike down" or "fail"). Some examples:
Norik, original: Unity, Duty, Destiny. It starts with Unity. Dub: Unity, Responsibility, Duty. Starting with Duty.
Nidhiki, original(to himself, lamenting Krekka's stupidity): Why do I bother? Dub(to Krekka): What does it matter?
The fourth movie, The Legend Reborn got a new translator, for better or worse. Glatorian simply became gladiators, while the giant Skopio beast was called scorpion. As for the dialog:
Metus, original: l told you, Raanu, pitting Vastus against Tarix would pack them [the audience] in. Dub: I told you, Raanu, pitting Vastus against Tarix is a big mistake!
For the longest time the Norwegian translators of 'Family Guy' couldn't decide how to translate the opening theme leaving the line "Lucky there's a Family Guy" translated differently every time, frequent errors include "Walter is a Family Guy", "Peter is a Family Guy" and even "Lucky is a family guy", leaving the word Lucky untranslated as if it was the name of a character.
In the Swedish dub of Batman The Brave And The Bold, the English line "I feel invincible" was translated into "Jag känner mig osynlig", meaning "I feel invisible".
One Swedish translator tasked with subtitling The Simpsons episodes managed to confuse "fry" with "freeze", thus translating "I got this deep fryer on loan from the US Army. It can flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds" into "I got this deep freezer on loan from the US Army. It can freeze a buffalo in 40 seconds."
The Ben10 cartoons is Hungary were handed over to a translator who had a fondness for translating everything word-for-word without taking the context into consideration. Thus we got gems like "Beats me" becoming "It's hitting me", and the "plant" part of the word power-plant also proved to be too tough of a nut to crack. So these facilities became patches of vegetation in the dub.
Same with the Hungarian World Of Quest. "Carnies" (as in, carnival people) became "Carnivores", Dear God. Often, the lines failed to make even grammatical sense.
And in yet another Hungarian example, the localization of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic also seems to be heading this way, though not to such an extreme degree, but it's still half-assed enough to be bothersome.
The Swedish dub, while not completely terrible, seems to have had little to no effort put into the translation. The worst examples include translating "the Wonderbolts" into "Underskruvarna" ("the Wonderscrews") in the pilot episode and translating the episode title "Applebuck Season" into "Äppelpengssäsong" ("Apple Money Season"). There are various other things to complain about, but most of them are due to lack of effort rather than misunderstandings.
Perhaps even more disastrous is how they translated the line "You don't wanna get a tummy ache" into "Du vill väl inte ha ont i tummen?", believing that "tummy" meant "thumb". As the context is about eating too fast, this is basically inexcusable. Humorously enough, the reaction shot that follows can easily be interpreted as targeted at the translation itself. Another case of plain idiocy is how "pet alligator" was translated into "leksakskrokodil" ("toy crocodile"). Ignoring the change in species, how can anyone believe that something that's obviously alive - and in fact attempts to attack one of the characters mere seconds later - is a toy? And further more, in the Winter Wrap-Up song, Twilight wonders how she's gonna be able to help without using her wand.
Congratulations Rarity, you're the new Rainbow Dash.
The reason for these half-assed mistakes in the Hungarians translations originates from the mostly "Truth in Television" stereotype of translators/localizators being not educated, well-informed professionals, but relatives of some people (cough-cough "Nepotism"), with minimal knowledge of the foreign language and a bad dictionary (this is especially true with english as most of the people who went to school after the "The Great Politics Mess-Up" learned some(emphasis on the some) english.
Speedy Gonzales: In the episode called "The Pied Piper Guadalupe", one of the mice carries a "Loco El Gato" sign. This is a wrong translation of "Crazy Cat". It should have said "El gato loco", or, even better "¡El gato está loco!" or "¡Qué gato tan loco!".
Spain's dub has its dumb moments. Perhaps the most infamous is the time Lucy Lawless did a guest appearance and the translator translated her last name, so she was Lucy Sin Ley. Seriously, how can you screw something like that.
Frustratingly enough, this same mistake happened in the Brazilian dub, wherein she was Lucy Sem Lei
