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alt title(s): My Name Is Prince Darien; Errors Through Localization "Darien? Serena? I've never heard these names before. What is it that you want?" — Prince Darien, Sailor Moon dub episode "Last Resort"
So you're an English anime dubber, likely a bad one. And you come across a scene in your original source that just doesn't work with the changes you already made. Maybe there's a change in honorifics, or a character whose death you censored has to come Back From The Dead.
What is there to do? Why, completely blow it off, of course! Just pretend the last change you made never happened and translate it completely normally. So what if you just took a two by four to the plot? Who cares if your dialogue doesn't make any sense? Send that script out the door, and let the fans deal with it. If you even assume that the fans are smart enough, particularly given their age, to notice.
Yes, sometimes the guys working on a script, having written themselves into a corner, will completely blow off the changes they already made and start adapting something completely literally, even if the resulting script makes no sense. Sometimes they'll even adapt a cultural custom with zero explanation — and nobody in the show will act surprised. The resulting disconnect creates a big giant plot hole and the only recourse of the fan is to just look up the original version, or just ignore it themselves.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- Sailor Moon regularly fell victim to this. One instance in the first season is where Mamoru is brainwashed and falls into an Evil Costume Switch version of his alter ego Endymion. For some reason, the English dub decided to keep his past name the same as his reborn name, which got to be very awkward when he didn't recognize the name "Darien" even though he called himself Prince Darien.
- They did it again to poor Mamoru when the gang gets transported to Crystal Tokyo by Darien's future self, King Endymion. Apparently, "Endymion" was too hard for the dubbers to pronounce, because he introduces himself to the Senshi with the not-at-all-awkward "Call me... 'King Of The Earth'". (Usagi, surprisingly, remains Neo-Queen Serenity here.) When the dub was continued by a different company, one episode of SuperS finally mentioned the name "Endymion"... except that no one unfamiliar with the original version was going to be aware of where this name came from all of a sudden.
- Lesser instances include inconsistency when Calling Your Attacks, along with the game of "what will they bowdlerise "Messiah" into next?", both of which happened after they changed dub companies.
- Fisheye, a male villain usually edited in foreign adaptations for certain reasons, inexplicably kept his shirtless reveal scene in the Russian dub — instead, the bystanders' dialogue was changed to call him an uncouth woman. The English dub did, of course, make an attempt to alter the scene in question, but failed to remove all instances of a shirtless Fisheye...
- Later, in the Russian-dubbed Stars season, Haruka basically was turned into another Starlight — they gave her a really bad man's voice in civilian form. This, despite the fact that she was acknowledged as female in S, which was translated by another company.
- A particularly amusing plothole involves Kaolinite's alias, Kaori. In the dub, when Serena/Usagi visits Dr. Tomoe, she is surprised to see Kaolinite (Kaori Night in the dub) there. In the original, Tomoe says that she is his assistant, Kaori, so Usagi is relieved. In the dub, however, the assistant is ALSO named Kaori Night, which led us to a change that sounded something among the lines of: "Whew! I thought she was the evil Kaori Night, but she is another Kaori Night!". Epic Clark Kenting.
- A rather amusing inconsistency came up when Lita, trying to get out of taking a kitten from Serena, said that her mother was allergic to cats. Lita's mother died in an airplane crash. Ironically, this never had to come up at all — the dub had never had bring this up because the anime assumed the viewers had read the manga, which did say where her parents were, and Makoto never mentions them. The Japanese script had Makoto offering a completely different excuse.
- Another one cropped up when somebody forgot that the English dub completely changed the final two episodes of the first series to remove the deaths of the main characters. The Japanese version of Episode 46 had a brief scene in the middle of the episode where Mamoru's mental conflict of trying to undo Metaria's brainwashing was shown in his mind as himself in a hospital bed struggling to remember who he was (mirroring his original amnesia over his past before he lost his parents). Usagi, in her school uniform (not as Sailor Moon) appeared and promised she would help him. This scene was, in the dub, used at the end of the episode instead and presented as an event that actually happened, which caused any number of plotholes — such as, why was Darien in the hospital and everyone else from the same fight okay despite everyone suffering grave injury? And how come just one episode later, despite Serena introducing herself to him in the hospital and apparently forming a friendship, do they act like they barely know each other?
- In the Latin American dub, they actually died. It was my first experience in life to both a Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel.
- Several popped up because episode 43, the episode that covered Minako's backstory, was dropped. This episode showed the team desperately searching for an entrance in their area to the Dark Kingdom, as well as establishing that the sun was slowly being covered by sun spots, heralding the return of Queen Metaria. They find the entrance at the end of the episode, leading directly to their first assault in Episode 44. There was also another scene of Mamoru being brainwashed and Metaria actually possessing his body, thus explaining why it was so hard to get through to him when he fought with Sailor Moon in the last episode. Since all of this is missing from the dub, the Sailor Scouts are just running into the Negaverse with no explanation, making one wonder why they didn't do this before. There is no explanation for why Sailor Moon's abilities don't work on Mamoru anymore. There are also numerous shots of the sun in the last episode of the dub (all shots from the combined 45-46) that show the progression of the sun spots. These are left as random, unexplained images in the dub — they never bothered to explain why they were showing images of the sun getting blacked out.
- Furthermore, because episodes 45 and 46 were heavily edited to cover up the deaths of the main characters, Sailor Mercury's death originally showed her breaking the illusion device the DD Girls had been using to attack the Senshi. The dub cut almost the entire sequence, so it appears that the Doom and Gloom Girls inexplicably stop using the illusions that had helped them take out two of the Scouts effortlessly.
- In Tokyo Mew Mew, Masaya chases Ichigo
 , who is running away in fear that her Secret Identity has been exposed. He finally stops her by calling her by her first name instead of her last. In the dub, however, he'd always called her by her first name, so she just stops for no apparent reason.
- In the Sonic X dub, when Eggman base explodes because of Chaos Control, Amy asks, "What is that?" then Knuckles says, "It used to be Chaos Control," where in the original, he just said "Chaos Control..." The original is referring to Chaos Control as the power of the emeralds, but the dub seems to refer to it as the name of Robotnik's base.
- This mistake pops up again. When Eggman tries to convince Knuckles that Sonic is evil, during a flashback, he talks about how Sonic attacked, invaded, and destroyed Chaos Control, as his base goes by on screen.
- The Digimon Adventure 02 dub accidentally turned Jou's two brothers into Joe's one brother. After the writing staff was replaced, both brothers appeared in the same scene and no reference was made.
- "Hi, I'm Jou. This is my brother Joe and my other brother Joe."
- And then, it took them a long time to decide exactly what Matt's living situation was, first saying that he and TK were "half-brothers", then deciding that they were full brothers whose parents were divorced, but Matt lived with his mother, all the way up to when it was actually shown that Matt lived with his father, and TK with his mother.
- A minor example was present in Adventure 02's episode 45, "The Dark Gate". In the original, in a certain moment of the battle, Imperialdramon blocks an attack using a blue force field — on that moment, Daisuke (Davis) and Ken reminisce about when the same force field protected them in their "Digimon World Tour". In the dub, however, the translator actually thought the flashback was a regular scene of the fight, so he made up something like: Davis and Ken are afraid of getting hit by an attack of Daemon (nevermind that said one isn't even looking at them), so Imperialdramon, somehow, manages to surround them in his force field. The dub never bothers to explain why did the force field disapear less than
a minute ten seconds later.
- In the first episode of Digimon Adventure in the English dub Mimi says that she's starting to miss her little brother but later on when they get home she is an only child and always had been.
- A big plot hole was created in the Digimon Adventure dub in the episode where Tai and Koromon are briefly transported to Earth and Kari is introduced. In the original, Tai receives a message on his computer from Izzy, who is in a space-like area and acting cold. This is shown happening on Izzy's end three episodes later. In the dub, Izzy is now screaming at him to not come back to Digi-World due to some unspecified danger. So later, when the episode in which the scene plays on Izzy's end, it's treated like a different event entirely, even though Izzy clearly now has a blank expression and is in the universe where he was seen on Tai's computer back in the earlier episode.
- The Pokémon anime has Takeshi's (Brock's) mother running away, which was actually edited up her death (as 4Kids felt that Brock having both of his parents abandon him was too sad). Since the episode she appears in happens much later in the show, it was pretty much ignored.
- Notice how Brock looks like his father, but nothing like his mother. It's possible that that "mom" is actually his stepmom, although that's just a theory.
- Let's not forget Ash's 3 dozen Tauros that apparently came out of nowhere!.
- While Pokémon was very well localised, with puns almost always translated to keep meaning, the short Camp Pikachu had a scene where Wobbuffet and Wynaut were locked in an endless, repeating conversation, saying their names to one another over and over. In the Japanese original, this was because their names were Sonans and Sohnano, which sound like the Japanese words meaning "That's how it is" and "Really?" respectively. Translating the names of the Pokémon to keep the pun in there (perhaps something like Thatsreite and Issit?) would have preserved the joke. It would also have explained why Wobbuffet kept jumping out of Jessie's Pokéball to finish off the motto by saying his name. Notably, many of the other translated names for Wobbuffet (such as the Korean "Majayong" and the French "Qulbutoke") keep the "that's right" meaning in some form.
- In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, Wobbuffet is the only Pokémon whose speech doesn't fall under the Translation Convention. That's because, in Japanese, it sounded like he was confirming "that's right!" to everything.
- "And the world will turn to...ash.". The problem is, Latin American viewers don't know enough English to know that Ash Ketchum's first name means "ceniza", prompting the Latin American voices to explain this to the audience.
- An episode of Ojamajo Doremi 's 4K dub had a random woman at an audition say about Onpu/Ellie's performance, "What a wonderfully talented little girl. I wonder who her mother is." Except that said random woman, in the original, actually is her mom. Clip.
- That may have been intentional as an attempt to cast said mother as an attention whore, e.g. she's basically saying "Who raised this wonderful, talented girl? Clearly someone talented did. Why, wait, that was me!"
- The Spanish (for Spain) and Portuguese dub for Ojamajo Doremi also had its own naming problem: Onpu's fairy Lolo was renamed Fafa. Problem is that Pop's fairy was originally named Fafa, so they renamed her Solsol. (The dub for Latin America, however, does keep the Lolo name.)
- In ROD the TV Series Nenene wants Anita to call her "Nenene-neesan." This is translated as "Big Sister Nenene", which Anita complains is too hard to say. Clearly a parsing wonk.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Any scene that uses the dub phrase "Shadow Realm", Especially dubious, given the ways you can apparently get there (having your legs sliced off, falling through a roof, losing all your Life Energy, making a Heroic Sacrifice, etc.) and that it's actually its own separate term within the universe.
- This was pretty glaring at one point where Kaiba simply HAD to win a duel against Yugi at the top of a castle. He walked to the edge of the cliff and threatened to jump if Yugi played the winning move. 4Kids changed this to Kaiba threatening to be blown off the edge of the roof by a virtual reality explosion — something that is clearly not a threat in the animation itself nor described as a threat before or after this scene in the rest of the series.
- And then there's the guard's line when Ishizu gets off the plane: "Welcome to America, Miss Ishtar." 4Kids seems to have realized just how stupid that move was, however, as there is never any reference to countries afterward.
- Kaiba's difficulty in translating The Winged Dragon of Ra's effects certainly qualifies. In the original manga and anime, every character who summons the Winged Dragon has to recite a hieratic text in the process, so Kaiba runs a rapid computer translation effort, in an attempt to figure out what the card does and how to properly use it. In the dub, however, characters summoning the monster simply have to recite a rhyming poem, and Kaiba STILL has to run his desperate translation.
- There was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it handwave that there was more than just the chant printed on the card, and that extra stuff was what Kaiba was trying to translate.
- There's also the matter of the name of Yugi's alter-ego. In the original, he was called "Yami no Yugi" (among other nicknames), meaning "Dark Yugi". Some dub media referred to him as the shortened version "Yami Yugi", and the dub itself took "Yami" and treated it as the character's proper name - which caused problems when searching for his true name "Atem" became a plot point.
- This was also the case in Latin America. His name was always "Yami Yugi".
- Also, episode 25. In this episode, Anzu/Téa decides to duel Mai because Yugi was mentally affected after losing and almost killing Kaiba. In the middle of the duel, she draws a trap card — "Waboku" — and says: "Waboku... I know this card is powerful, but I can't remember what it does!" The cards are actually supposed to have the effects written on them. This may be an attempt by 4Kids to cover up that their localization removes the text, but then creates the strange concept that everyone who plays Duel Monsters has to memorize the effects of literally thousands of cards.
- Likewise, Yu-Gi-Oh GX has developed to tendency to make dialogue changes while leaving any corresponding original visuals completely unaltered, so this is probably Executive Meddling:
- The constant rain motif in Edo's flashbacks in the second season is always seen at his father's grave, and thus was edited out. Thus the re-use of the motif in Edo's mental conversation with Saiou while he's dueling him seems a little random.
- Rei's age was lowered from twelve to eight, an age she definitely didn't look — especially when she hit a growth spurt between appearances. An Authors Saving Throw was actually made by not bringing the age up on the second go-round. Didn't work.
- Manjyome's nickname, "Thunder", is a wordplay gag that was left out rather than adapted, so what's with the thunderbolts that frequently accompany his new Catch Phrase?
- True to form, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds has a goof as well. The dub treated Jack's current motorbike and the one he stole from Yusei as one and the same - but they recently showed a flashback to the theft, completely ignoring the fact that the two bikes look nothing alike.
- The 5Ds dub also had Rex Goodwin claim to be the fifth Signer, even though identity hasn't yet been revealed in the original. 4Kids may end up being correct, but I'm thinking due to a lucky guess rather than inside info from the Japanese producers.
- It turns out that Rudger Godwin is the 5th Signer, not Rex Godwin. There is both spoken proof and onscreen proof. So it's the right family, but the wrong brother. Nice going there 4Kids.
- Although they appear to have gotten lucky as After intentionally losing his duel with Rudger, Rex has taken Rudgers arm and replaced his articifcial arm with it, in effect making him both a Signer and a Dark Signer.
- The English dub of the first Tenchi Muyo OVA series misidentified Tenchi's dead mother as his grandmother when she appeared in a flashback. This led to confusion, as Tenchi's issues about his mother's death became more important. And some fans became really confused when Airi introduced herself as Tenchi's
grandmother mother's mother in Tenchi Muyo! GXP.
- In fact the mother/grandmother confusion was not a dub error, but was in the original Japanese: in the episode 5 flashback, young Tenchi called her “baa-chan” (grandmother). There have been persistent claims that he really said “kaa-chan”, a possible form of “mother”, but careful listening reveals that this is definitely not so. Fans are still awaiting a satisfactory explanation.
- The original show had its own name trip up, as we didn't learn the given name of Tenchi's mother until well after hearing the same name given to a novel character for the TV series.
- Haruhi Suzumiya, before her Important Haircut, ties her hair with bows of colors corresponding to the Japanese names of the weekdays. In the dub, these colors become a complete non-sequitur when she lists them, apparently pulling these colors from nowhere (which isn't exactly out of character).
- This is actually part of a more general pattern where the dub was a very direct translation that often chose to be vaguely Japanese rather than adapt references and events to American culture. For example, Golden Week was maintained as-is.
- The Slayers has a scene where Lina Inverse appears with a whip saying "Call me Queen..." and commenting that she doesn't need to explain every stupid gag. This is not a generic bondage joke, but a reference to the character Tira Misu in Sorcerer Hunters; in Japan, both characters were voiced by Megumi Hayashibara. In the dub they have different voice actresses (Tira: Tamara Lo, Lina: Lisa Ortiz), making the joke meaningless.
- A similar case about a Sailor Moon parody was lampshaded in the dub of Excel Saga, which changed Excel's (whose Japanese VA was Sailor Moon) line from "Well that was a long time ago!" to "No fair! I wanted that part, but it was dubbed in Canada!" They also averted this in another Actor Allusion where Hyatt suddenly started talking like another character her Japanese VA did, which the dub just changed to a different character her English voice did.
- In a bit of an Averted Trope, many of the jokes in Lucky Star that relied purely on the fact that the main character was also played by the voice actress of the character's favourite anime icon, Suzumiya Haruhi (of Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu fame) have been kept for the English Dub, because the same English Voice Actress is also playing the two. A few other jokes still don't make any sense, though. (References to other characters or by different voice actors, for instance...)
- They also have voiced by the same guy that voiced Taniguchi as Minoru.
- To be more exact, thanks to this episode 16 has every single meta-joke intact. Konata cosplaying as Haruhi, A Kyon lookalike ordering soup from a Nagato waitress (including their Next Episode banter as well), and even the small song that Minoru hums at the end of Lucky channel being the same one hummed in Suzumiya (specifically the one Taniguchi hums when he bumps into Kyon and Nagato).
- Yu Yu Hakusho once featured a fight in the dark that Yusuke won because someone threw a lit cigarette into the battleground and he attached to the belt of his enemy to let him see where he is. Though this stayed in the first airing on Adult Swim, the censored version cuts this out, changing his victory from a small amount of dumb luck to a complete Deus Ex Machina.
- Another one from Yu Yu Hakusho. When it was dubbed and released in South America, Bishounen Kurama was changed into a girl and called Denise. He was given a female voice actor and everything. This actually worked, up until an episode where Kurama has to take off his shirt. The dubbers handwaved this, saying that Kurama was really a male demon who was only pretending to be female on earth. Oops.
- 4Kids managed to cut out about 30% of One Piece during their unfortunate dubbing run, explaining the contradictions via a series of extremely confusing edits (chiefly involving how the crew managed to acquire an important Plot Coupon without actually going through the arc they got it in). Had they continued, the confusion would have only gotten worse, as the missing content returned with a plot-critical vengeance some two hundred plus episodes later.
- The edits, apart from editing out Laboon and the giant chiefs on Little Garden come back to haunt them earlier than that. They have to almost completely rewrite the Rain Dinners scene after Mr. 3 comes in because they removed Little Garden (including Mr. 3's defeat and Sanji impersonating him while taking a call from Crocodile). In addition, Luffy refusing to take Ms. All Sunday's Eternal Pose to Alabasta is a non-issue, because Vivi somehow happens to have one (rather than Sanji getting one on Little Garden).
- Voltron is a very rare case where changing something in the dub actually works in the dubbers' favor. The character Sven dies a few episodes into the series — in the Japanese version. In the US version, this was censored into him getting "badly injured" and having to leave the Five Man Band to heal. Over in Japan, his character's death caused such an uproar that the writers clumsily re-inserted him by having his (identical) cousin join for an episode. All the dubbers had to do was claim the original Sven had at last recovered.
- Naruto has a minor one in regards to one attack of the title character called "Uzumaki Naruto Rendan (Combo)" in Japanese and "Naruto Uzumaki Barrage" in the dub. He calls his attack by saying one syllable of the first word for each hit, but since "Naruto" has one less syllable than "Uzumaki", he just grunts for one attack instead of saying anything.
- It's handled better in Clash of Ninja; instead of grunting, he separates "Uzumaki" into "Uzu-maki". Then cue the realization that the story mode of the game takes place entirely before Naruto learns this move.
- In the manga (where the names are still reversed) and Naruto Ultimate Ninja, it's "U-zu-ma-ki Naruto Barrage!"
- There's a more noticeable one in a filler episode special. Sakura says it's celebrating the show's fourth anniversary, which she also says in the dub... but because the dub aired episodes slightly faster (for a long time there was two episodes a week) it had been just over three years since it began American broadcast.
- In the Spanish dub of Rurouni Kenshin, the translators made some really random changes to the names of characters and places. This includes changing the location of the whole Tokyo Arc to Kyoto, making for some really confusing moments (in the expository voiceover that opens the Steam Locomotive episode, Kaoru's voice actress explains the train run from Tokyo to Yokohama. They proceed to take the train... even though we've been told they were in Kyoto). When later in the series the action moves to Kyoto, they decided to call it "Edo", despite that just being an older name for Tokyo.
- It's made even more confusing by the fact that they seemed to forget to change the names of the places once in a while, and as a result, when Kaoru and Yahiko leave in the steam boat, they mention they're leaving for Kyoto. Despite suposedly being there already.
- Also, they changed the names of the little girls from Suzume and Ayame to "Suzi" (pronounced in a weird, distinctively non-Spanish way) and "Yumi". Naturally, later on, they had to rename Yumi Komagata "Ayumi".
- In the Brazilian dub they had a similar problem, but a little worse: Tokyo, Edo, Kyoto and "Ayoya" (originally Aoi-ya) are used randomly, often being treated as they were same thing (even the last one that isn't even a city).
- While the lists of edits made for the Toonami version of Outlaw Star is extensive, most are understandable (or at least consistent with a Never Say Die vibe). However, there's Episode 7 - Creeping Evil: Near the end of the episode, Gene gets hit in the back by a Pirate's "blaster". Back on board the Outlaw Star, Jim puts his hand on Gene's back and (originally) exclaims "What the hell is this" at the sight of blood on his hand. Lots of it. Only the blood was digitally removed, turning the "Oh shit! Gene's bleeding to death!" moment into "Oh shit! I have a hand!" Equally inexplicably, Jim clearly says "hell". Future reruns changed hell to "heck", but Jim's still freaked out by his palm. No way the folks in charge of the Toonami edit realize how nonsensical the edits worked out.
- Ranma ˝ has a minor one in the manga. Pantyhose Taro is said to have gone into another cursed spring, the "Spring of Drowned Octopus". Yes, a drowned octopus. No one actually think this is odd. There was also a case where Akane was put into a spring and it became "Spring of Drowned Akane". The thing is, the original name formula would be more like "Spring of Submerged X". The former however, can be considered a Woolseyism because the Fridge Logic just makes it hilarious.
- The dub for Dragon Ball GT goes out of its way to fill in a plot hole. In the original Japanese version, Oozaru Baby Vegeta simply talked without his mouth actually moving except when laughing. The dub has Goku point this out and tries to justify it while also explaining how Baby still has control over Vegeta and even dubbing the laughter and grunts and such in a more Oozaru voice. Although as a result, Goku seems more shocked over that fact that Oozaru Baby Vegeta's mouth doesn't move when he talks than he is about the whole retaining control thing.
- What about the "Great Namekian Cover-up"? Back when Bandai's name was still attached to Dragonball Z, great pains were taken to remove any references to the fact that Freeza and his men were killing the Nameks by removing bodies in screen, cutting scenes of the killings as well as one of Gohan burying one village, and editing the dialouge to refer to them as though they were still alive. They didn't even bother with the usual "next dimension" excuse; they simply pretended that the Nameks weren't dead. This doesn't become so much of a plot hole until they finally get around to wishing all of those killed by Freeza back to life, but it was still utterly ridiculous.
- In Latin America, Pilaf was called "El Marciano" (The Martian) in "Dragon Ball", and "Pilaf" in "D Ragon Ball GT".
- Also, only three Dragon Ball Z were released in Argentina (The Tree Of Might, the first Brolly movie and the Gogeta one), making episodes that reference those unaired movies confusing.
- Enma Daioh was called "Ox Satan" in Latin America, causing confusion with the character Mr. Satan.
- Muten Roshi was always "El Maestro Roshi" (Master Roshi) in Latin America, which confused viewers when "Dragonball Evolution" had Chow-Yun Fat refer himself as "the great Muten Roshi".
- The dub of Vision Of Escaflowne has a character mention in the second episode that Zaibach are the ones attacking Fanelia. However, we aren't supposed to know it's them until episode 3, and even in the dub, everyone's supposed to be surprised when they find out Zaibach did it.
- When Rockman EXE was Macekred into Mega Man NT Warrior, entire episodes were cut, including the episode where Aki-chan was introduced, so her later appearances left a gaping hole in the plot of the dub. Another one that cropped up happened with a rematch between the hero and a villain that, in the Japanese original, took place a mere seven episodes after their first fight. In the dub, this rematch was moved to take place 42 episodes later. By that time the hero and the villain had reconciled and the villain even had a new Navi. Even further issues cropped up from the choice of KidsWB to skip, reshuffle, and not air the episodes. This dub had two forces working against it. Other countries that got this show had the same problems, since the dubs were still distributed by Sho Pro.
- The forgettable yet spirituous Medabots had a couple of these:
- As Megaman NT Warrior above, Medabots suffered from an awful reshuffle of episodes. Actually, in the first "season" the company skipped the episodes that it considered uninsteresting, only to insert them as the first episodes of "season 2". The problem here was that in the end of season 1 Ikki and Metabee had only a week before the International Robattle Championship, but it only started 14 episodes after said announcement. The dub could have solved the matter by simply saying that it was delayed, but it didn't.
- In the same reshuffling, Rokusho shows up in many of the first episodes of "Season 2", regardless of the fact that he had a dramatic goodbye in "Season 1" to find his reason of living. No one seems to be a little surprised to see him again.
- A more straightforward and non-related to episode shuffling case was Metabee's naming. In the first episode, after getting his Medabot, Ikki named him Metabee. Some 50 episodes later, someone comments that the Medabot responsable for a horrible incident was also named Metabee - then Ikki rushes to the store saying that it was Henry, co-worker in said store, who named Metabee (cue a flashback with altered dialogue).
- The Scandinavian dubs of Ginga Nagareboshi Gin contain massive plotholes because all of the violence was cut (mostly character deaths), as well as numerous plot-important scenes with no violence whatsoever. The show never was dubbed into English despite many rumors suggesting it would - and likely with similar massive cuts.
- In the fifth episode of Trigun, while running from an entire town population trying to capture him for his bounty, Vash says "until I find this man you're looking for, I have no choice but to keep moving." This response makes no sense in any context, let alone for the fact that Vash is the man they're looking for. What he was supposed to say was more like "Until I find the man I'm looking for," referring to his brother and series Big Bad, Knives.
- Transformers Energon is one long dub induced plothole. It has more problems than this page can properly contain, including but not limited to randomly skipping over an entire episode... which included a character plot point that comes up several times thereafter. In fact, the series when watched straight through is nearly incomprehensible.
- Due to episode shuffling, the Card Captors dub of Card Captor Sakura had Kero advising Sakura to use Windy, Fly, and Shadow to capture the Watery card because they were her oldest cards. In the actual anime, those were the only cards she had at the time.
Literature
- The french translation of A Series Of Unfortunate Events had lots of it, though many of them weren't entirely the translator's fault: due to the unfinished status of the series at the time, and the repeated use of Chekhovs Guns in later plots, many apparently innocent adaptations ended up causing problems. Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss, in a well-intentioned effort to adapt puns and wordplays, were changed to Jérôme d'Eschemizerre et Juge Abott. Then, new books in the series were published, where the fact that these characters shared their initials with another person, J.S, ended up as an important and compulsatory plot point. Out of desperation, the translator had everyone in later books call them Jérome Salomon d'Eschemizerre and Judith Sybil Abott, even though these parts of their names had never been mentioned, acknowledged or revealed before. Every single character acted as if they had known their complete names from the very start, when they clearly didn't; the reader was supposed to think they had learned all of this off-screen. There are many other examples, but this is the most unfortunate.
- From the Harry Potter series: Prisoner of Azkaban has Dumbledore briefly mentioning that Trelawney has just made only her 2nd correct prediction. Her first prediction is a plot point two books later. The Chinese translation of this mistranslates this brief mention. Source.
- The American English editions of the books have always attempted to [[Americanization Americanize]] the text for the benefit of American children. However, sometimes the publishers would forget this, leading to a strange scene in Goblet of Fire in which Harry attempts to enter Dumbledore's office using "Sherbet Lemon", a password he remembered from several years ago, specifically, in Chamber of Secrets and also a reference to Dumbedore's favorite candy. The problem is, the American editions of the book had altered every instance of "Sherbet Lemon" to "Lemon Drop" in the previous books. Goblet of Fire had reverted it back to "Sherbet Lemon" for this one instance, so suddenly Harry is spouting off a password that he's never heard. Since he specifically notes that this is the same password used before, this can't easily be Hand Waved as a faulty memory.
- In Latin America, "Tom Marvolo Riddle" is modified so it can be a Spanish-language anagram in "Chamber of Secrets", but kept unmodified in the following books.
- This page tells about an example of this trope as applied to Discworld, the Spanish translations, and Death's gender.
- The Dutch translation of the Death Gate Cycle suffers horribly from this. After a few books, when he starts running into trouble because of it, the translator plain gives up and starts using the original English words and names - entirely ignoring the fact that he'd given the same characters arbitrarily chosen Dutch names earlier on.
Live Action TV
- The Russian dub of the 2005 season of Doctor Who gave the characters generic Russian voices, but retained the line where Rose asks the Doctor about his Northern accent — even though he sounds perfectly normal.
- Note that the original voices are often heard in Russian dubbing - still, most of the readers wouldn't recognize a Mancunian accent.
- The French dub of Lost recasts Rousseau as German to explain the foreign-ness of the (originally French) radio transmission in the pilot. However, this creates continuity problems with her name and the use of the song "La Mer" in "Whatever the Case May Be". The writers have speculated on the official podcast as to the dub's treatment of the French science team in season 5.
- In Get Smart, a running gag created by Maxwell Smart's Latin American voice actor, Jorge "El Tata" Arvizu, was his unseen aunt from Acapulco, which caused some confusing in the episode where Max's uncles (who were not from Acapulco) came to visit him. Made all the more confusing because Max's "aunt from Acapulco" was a bachelorette romanced by a boatsman, and Max's real aunt was happilly married.
- In Latin American, Gomez Addams is known as "Homero Addams", which caused confusion with Homer the Spider.
- In an episode of "Alf", Alf jokes about making a BLT, a bacon, Lucky and Tomato sandwhich. The joke get translated identically in Latin America (where Lucky is called "Suertudo", which obviously doesn't begin with an L), thus ruining the joke.
Tabletop Games
- More of an edition change induced plothole, but in the 3.5 player's handbook, a priest of Pelor, the quintessentially good deity of Greyhawk, is seen using a Symbol of Pain spell, which good aligned gods cannot grant. What happened was that they reused some artwork from the 3.0 PHB of the priest using the pain aspect of the Symbol spell, which was originally an unaligned spell.
Theatre
- Early in the French-language play Waiting for Godot, Estragon mentions that the English don't pronounce the "l" in "calm", after which the use of the word by various characters becomes a Running Gag. The English-language version (translated by the author) has the line almost verbatim; the usual practice is to have Estragon, traditionally played with an Irish accent, say the word in an English one.
Video Games
- Lufia II suffered from this. Due to Nintendo of America being hard-liners against religious anything in games released in the US at the time, the Sinistrals had to be changed from being called gods to being called "super beings", and "pray" changed to "wish". In the first reference, this worked ("You talking about the super beings out to rule the world?"). In later references it became more awkward ("I wonder what I should wish for."). And in the religiously devoted endgame town of Narvick, it completely fell apart ("There's super beings and there's evil beings, right? So if there can be evil super beings, why no good evil ones?").
- When Lufia II was released in Germany, it was simply called "Lufia" (the first game hadn't been released there), and the Dual Blade was renamed to "Lufiaschwert" ("Lufia Sword"). And Lufia III did this again.
- Not quite the same, as it occurs in both the original and the dub, but close enough to be worth mentioning: Sonic Rush clearly establishes both Blaze the Cat and Eggman Nega as being from an alternate universe, but come next-gen Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic Rivals, Sega has inexplicably moved them to being from the future (with Eggman Nega being Robotnik's descendant). Fans weren't too happy with the nonsensical change, so once Sonic Rush Adventure came out, both characters returned to being from another dimension... but then came Sonic Rivals 2.
- Perhaps this can be explained as Alternate Continuity by console-making company and/or developer, since the Rush games are only on Nintendo DS and developed by Dimps, while the next-gen Sonic and Rivals games are not on Nintendo systems, the latter being developped by Backbone Entertainment.
- It should be noted that Sonic 06 never happened due to a Reset Button press, so one can safely ignore the misclassification.
- Word Of God still regularly references Sonic 06 as Silver's origin story, it is still Canon. Sonic Rush is also referenced as Blaze's origin story, and Sonic Rivals status in the canon is unknown. There is no explanation for Blaze being in the future, but both games are canon.
- Anyone remember the part where Blaze pulls that Heroic Sacrifice and gets sent into another dimension by Silver? Yeah, it happened, because Blaze was severed from the timeline of Earth-Alpha. Alhough Reset Button was hit and the events never happened, Blaze was still sent to an alternate dimension, the one we see in the Rush games. Why are there no references in the Rush games to Sonic '06? Maybe because the two characters BARELY MET during the game.
- On the subject of Sonic The Hedgehog, the decision of early translators to change Sonic's home world from Earth to Mobius probably didn't seem like much of a stretch at the time (many of the levels in the early games looked more surreal that anything you'd find on Earth anyway). Years later, after Sonic Adventure, Earth started being mentioned by name, humans other than Robotnik/Eggman appeared, and locations took on more realistic elements. Of course, this lead to confusion in many fans who grew up with the numerous manuals, comic books, and TV adaptations which placed Sonic on Mobius. Extra lines were also added in Sonic Adventure to explain "Eggman" as a nickname used by Sonic & Co to make fun of him while Dr. Robotnik was his actual name, though the latter games don't seem to bother with this.
- The US Sonic comic tried to reconcile this by revealing that Mobius WAS Earth...in the future.
- According to rumors, the original Sonic games were deliberately made with no in-game plot, allowing each region to provide its own backstory in the manual, or other materials, thus avoiding translation difficulty or cultural incompatibilities (since the first Sonic was also designed to crack the Western market). Thus in Japan it was on Earth and in America it was on Mobius. Then Sonic Adventure came around and they changed their minds, resulting in hefty retcons.
- The only time any Sonic game material has called Earth "Mobius" was when an interview article with Yuji Naka MISTAKENLY referred to the planet as "Mobius", when Mr. Naka was trying to talk about those corkscrew things in Sonic 2.
- Breath of Fire 2 has an island filled with giant monsters and two cameo characters from the first game. One mention that he has found a weird stone and that when he holds it, he can see his bones through the skin. One of the monster is called the A. Sludge. If you played the Japanese version, you find out that the A. in his name stand for Atomic! While the translation is technically correct, it doesn't explain much of why there are giant monsters on the island.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 had a particularly nonsensical one which was all the more egregious because the rest of the game was translated pretty well. Colonel Volgin, the Big Bad, has challenged Snake to a fight. Ocelot, Snake's Stalker With A Crush, is ostensibly working for Volgin. When Volgin begs him for a few encouraging words, Ocelot responds, "Fight like a man, Volgin." This offends him and shows him that Ocelot is siding with Big Boss on this fight — because Ocelot is, in the Japanese, rudely addressing him sans honorific. This was all lost in the English version, in which everyone usually refers to him as Volgin. Ocelot's voice actor attempted to rescue things by saying 'Volgin' in a rude tone, but it still didn't translate as well.
- Which is even stranger because the characters are speaking Russian.
- Ocelot does in fact normally refer to Volgin as "Colonel" although he only actually said it once or twice. With every single other character using "Volgin" it falls short...
- If I remember correctly, Volgin commands Ocelot to help him in the fight. The fact that Ocelot not only directly refuses an order from a superior officer, but also calls him out on his cheating to his face should have been enough for you to know that Ocelot isn't really in Volgin's boat at that point.
- Speaking of Metal Gear, Olga's child (Sunny) and Dr. Clark (Para-Medic), two unseen characters who were originally identified male in the series and later revealed to be female, were actually genderless in the Japanese versions. This is partly due to the way the Japanese language can address someone in third-person without using a gender-based pronoun. Snake casually talking about Olga's child as being a 'he' at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 is easy to handwave, since he didn't know what sex the kid was either, but Naomi describing the person she'd worked under for years as a 'he' is a bit less easy to explain. The (hilarious) novel attempts to Hand Wave it as Dr. Clark being a recluse who no-one even knew the sex of.
- Minor one in Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. Olga was voiced by Kyoko Terase in Japan, Meryl's voice actress, and because of Anime Accent Absence, the two had the same voice. In America, Olga was voiced by Vanessa Marshall in a thick Russian accent. In Substance, the Snake Tales added in a boss fight with Meryl - a modified version of the Olga battle, using Olga's sound clips. Meryl spontaneously developing a thick Russian accent is never explained.
- One of the original 151 Pokémon is called Mr. Mime in the English version ("Barrierd" in the Japanese). This worked fine in Red and Blue versions, when the only Pokémon that had genders were the Nidoran lines... but then Gold and Silver came along and gave genders to most non-legendary Pokémon, naturally leading to... female Mr. Mimes.
- The Pokémon games are actually subject to this quite often in the names of moves, especially since many of them had to be short enough for the old Game Boy games. One particular instance is Splash, a move that literally does nothing. In the Japanese, its name could actually be either "splash" or "hop", but since the original games only had a fish learning it, it became "Splash". This gets odd when land-based monsters in later games learned the move as well, but the translations basically turned a blind eye to it.
- Apparently the games are translated into German well before the anime comes out, or else they might have figured out that they got the translation for "Pound" kind of wrong. (Specifically, they used the German word for "pound" as in money.)
- Yeah, I am native german-speaking and always wondered about this: They use "Pfund" which is eighter, as you said, the money "pound" or a kind of weight. They should have used "Hieb", which does mean the kind of "pound" the move does. And this was not the only time the German version fell victim to something like that. For example, they used "Blitz" as a translation for "Flash". "Blitz", however, is closer to "Lightning" than to "Flash", making many players wonder why this isn't an electric move and why it doesn't look electric at all. "Lichtblitz" or "Leuchte" would have been better translations.
- The Spanish games have a few problems — for example, the attack "Counter" was translated as "Contador" ("accountant — apparently they though "counter" meant "someone who counts"). The Spanish dub of the anime properly translated it as "Contraataque" ("counterattack"), but then how are players supposed to know what's happening if the name is different from what's used in the games?
- There's a Yu-Gi-Oh! joke to be made here, but I can't think of one right now.
- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has Apollo getting a Noodle (Ramen) vendor as a client, who asks him to find his stolen Noodle cart. The vendor says that it was the same place that Phoenix and Maya went all the time when he still was a lawyer, which has never been mentioned before in the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney games. This is because of a Woolseyism - Maya asks people in the older games to get her "nice food", but she asks for ramen, a cheap and common food. This is nearly interchangeable with fast food in America, so to keep the joke intact, she asks for hamburgers in the English script. The Apollo Justice script didn't seem to be aware of the change and forgot to fix the reference to Phoenix and Maya being regulars.
- The series should be lauded for a string of both luck and cleverness in usually averting this problem — the setting was moved to America, but retains Japanese elements such as Shinto priestesses and samurai that would normally invoke this trope. However, even the Japanese scripts note that the characters take their traits to an absurd extreme anyway, so the English script is still able to justify these out of place cultural elements by attributing it to being quirks of the characters. Even the legal system has no problems simply because it's not supposed to be realistic at all.
- The British versions of the game still leave the setting in America, making the first case extremely difficult since a key clue hinges on the difference of timezones between Paris and California. The English versions games are, according to Word Of God, set in California, but the text never says this, so a British player would be completely baffled.
- The original Persona hits just about every other bad translation trope there is, so it's not surprising it gets this one, too. In the Japanese version, the two young girls in the other world are Mae and Aki... so it's not very surprising that they turn out to be aspects of the mind of party member Maki — as Nanjo points out, it's simple wordplay. In the English-language version, they're now Mae and Maggie, and Maki is Mary... but Nate (Nanjo) still gives the explanation that it's simple wordplay.
- The english release of the Trauma Center series moves the setting of both Under The Knife games to the United States instead of Japan (New Blood actually did take place in America) and changes most of the characters to be American. This doesn't normally cause a problem because they were careful to fix the script in the first game and its Wii remake. In the second game, however, someone wasn't paying attention and character Linda Reid, who reappears for a cameo, tells Derek that she passed her high school entrance exams. The Department of Health was also left as the Ministry of Health despite being corrected in the first game.
- It gets worse in New Blood, where suddenly everything about Caduceus in the dubs changes, because the Japanese version of New Blood was actually set in the US, and it couldn't be explained away. Suddenly, the cast members we're used to work at Caduceus Japan, and are even explained as such in-game.
- In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon plenty of calls forward exist to Monshou no Nazo, the SNES remake and sequel to the first game that was never released outside Japan. For example Nabarl's ending mentions that he has many impersonators (Samto, a recruitable character in book 2 of Monshou No Nazo, impersonates him). Another example is Elice flirting with Merric (Have them talk to eachother in chapter 24, 24x or final) as the two are a couple in the next game.
- Similarly, there's a number of plot holes that show up in Fire Emblem, aka Rekka no Ken, a prequel to another game that didn't come out over here. In particular, the game ends on what would appear to be an unexplained cliffhanger that was in fact a setup for the plot of the game that came before it.
- On the plus side Camus's death by Honor Before Reason and My Country Right Or Wrong works a lot better you don't know that He's Back From The Dead (and recruitable!) in the 3rd game as Sirius
- It's well-known amongst Street Fighter fans that M. Bison, Vega, and Balrog are different characters in the U.S. than they are in Japan thanks to a name shift performed in the original localization. This has led to some amusing moments when Japanese productions are subtitled — even in Street Fighter IV, the animated cutscenes for M. Bison repeatedly refer to him as "Vega-sama" on the Japanese audio while the subtitles still call him "Lord Bison". This is more of a sub-induced plot hole, however — the dub never has to worry about this problem.
- In the Japanese version of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance the starting party memebers have fixed names, while in the english versions they do not, pulling form the same pool of random names as other members. Later these same names are used for members of Clan Centurio (who are led by Montblanc) in Final Fantasy XII.
Western Animation
- Winx Club:
- In one episode, Tecna shot a "Sphere of Truth" at a teacher she thought was evil without any ill effect, but then the teacher turned out to be an evil clone much later (the very kind of thing her spell was supposed to expose). 4Kids never bothered to cover this up at all. It had been originally a plasma sphere, and one can assume that 4K changed it because it was violent. (Here's a video.)
- A rather extreme example: In S3, Icy supposedly gets a new fire power from the season's Big Bad and boasts about it. Yet just a few minutes later, she attacks Bloom (who has a similar fire power, only more powerful) with nothing but her usual ice attacks. Lather, rinse, repeat for the whole season. So you're thinking that they wasted a perfectly good power, right? But the original version doesn't have Icy boasting about a new power, and the fire was just there for show, so to speak. Clip.
- One episode ends with Stella saying that her father is pretending to be under Countess Cassandra's spell, which implies that Stella has broken the spell on him. Problem? When the show picks up on this plot again in a later episode, the climax is Stella breaking the spell he's supposedly only pretending to be under. However, instead of ignoring the change as usual, early in the episode, the dubbers had Stella rant "That third-rate countess has spelled him again!" while having Bloom comment that it might be part of his plan. Here's a video, and whether it works is left as an exercise to the reader.
- The English dubbers of the French Code Lyoko seem determined to erase any evidence that the Five Man Band's school is located in France, and are failing miserably, though this may just be dialogue mistakes. Hopefully, this also accounts for why no one raises an eyebrow to Odd making out with a girl who they're supposed to think is his cousin.
- One episode involved the group having to stop a rogue satellite from destroying
Yumi the country. As shown in the above image, several scenes with the supercomputer involved clearly show a map of France on one of the monitors.
- Not strictly a Dub Induced Plothole, but rather an Edit Induced Plothole: The syndication editors of The Simpsons cut out what turns out to be Waylon Smithers' alibi in the two-parter. There are quite a few others.
- For example, in one of the intercut shots at the end of part one (all of which to help set up the possible suspects) was of an empty cigar box in a patch of dug up dirt in the backyard (Marge had buried it just before the town meeting because Abe kept a gun in it). When part two came along, there's a scene between Abe and Marge, and when Marge left after speaking to him, Abe pulls out the gun, revealing that he dug up the gun to get it back (he wasn't neccesarily the one who shot Mr. Burns, though). This was cut from syndication despite resolving the cigar box tease in part one.
- In Latin America:
- In the old episodes, celebrities were changed for some reason, ruining half of the jokes. Luke Perry became "Robert Redford", the Richard Simmons robot became "the Lorenzo Lamas robot", Gaboo was countering Krusty's comeback special with "Luis Miguel and Juan Manuel", and so on. They stopped doing it in the old episodes.
- In one episode Mr. T introduces himself as "B.A. Barraca", even though his name in Latin America is "Mario Baraccus".
- The clip show about the family's past relationships call the character "Mindy Simmons", even though she was called "Margo Zabala" in the original episode.
- Smithers' first name is "Cástulo" in the old episodes, and "Waylon" in the new episodes.
- Flanders' wife name is "Magda" in the old episodes, and "Maude" in the new episodes
- the inspector is "Archundia" in the old episodes, and "Chalmers" in the new episodes.
- Lisa calls Skinners "Director Tanzarian" in one episode, even if his real name was "Armando Barreda".
- In the Danish animation Jungledyret Hugo: Den Store Filmhelt (Hugo the Movie Star), the antagonist has purchased an expanse of jungle specifically for the purpose of burning it down and flushing out Hugo. It is not mentioned in the English dub that he bought the land, leaving the viewer questioning just how he's getting away with destroying the jungle.
[[folder:Movies]]
- In Latin America:
- In Addams Family Values, the joke about Fester's name meaning "rot" is kept, even if Fester's name is "Lucas".
- In Underdog, they give a deep, booming voice to the midget villain Simon Bar Sinister.
- In Speed Racer, Racer X is called "El Corredor X", even though his name in the cartoon was "El Corredor Enmascarado".
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