Isn't the page image an example of Translation Trainwreck, not BIT, because the fire extinguisher sign is totally incomprehensible?
Edited by HeSupplanted15
I read the paragraph about the prohibition in California of translating "notary public" into "notario público" because it loses the ""someone who can authenticate signatures and take oaths" meaning.
Funny enough, in Spanish speaking countries (like mine) "notario público" means PRECISELY that. It's certainly not a government employee. ( https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notario
)
I'm wondering if the The Bible should have it's own page, as the King James version at least has a ton of these (understandable, as it was done before computer translation and the like).
You know, the french caption under the image is not a correct french sentence. Well, grammatically it's correct, but we don't say "extincteur de feu" because that would redundant, since there is almost no other use for the word "extincteur" than than the one that blows fire.
If there ever was a difference between this and Translation Train Wreck, it seems, to judge by all the overlap between the two, that it's been lost. Do these need a trip to the trope repair shop?
And? And? And? And? AND?
This page sure is filled to the brim with Justifying Edits with people sometimes outright defending what are pretty much just bad translations outright.
I'm quite confident in my shitposting you know
Removed this one:
- In a reversed case, English was blind idiot translated to Chinese here.
Unless you're good at reading Chinese, there is NO WAY to tell that's a "Blind Idiot" Translation.
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Not to mention that "Blind Idiot" Translation is not (in theory) language-specific. Presumably, you could have a "Blind Idiot" translation of Afrikaans into Klingon.
So...what's the difference between this trope and Translation Train Wreck? The pages don't make it clear. It seems like it's just The Same But More.
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If I understand the tropes correctly, "Blind Idiot" Translation is about overly literal translations, but Translation Train Wreck is about generally terrible translations.
It's hard to say how accurate my interpretation is.
Why is this punctuated as "Blind Idiot" Translation? That would be a translation of the phrase "blind idiot". This is a translation by a blind idiot - a translation by a native speaker would be a Native Speaker Translation, not a "Native Speaker" Translation.
EDIT: Never mind, just saw the explanation on the page.
Edited by johnnye
Meatbag
I'm curious would in-universe examples of Blind Idiot Translation (ex: Melody Pond -> River Song) fall under this or another trope?
Edited by Nymphonomicon WUT? Hide / Show Replies
so i made a new avatar
Why does clicking Engrish lead back here? It seems like they mean different things, so shouldn't it be its own trope?
Edited by PhysicalStamina To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."
what would the music section be called
I wanna add Madonna's I'm Sorry to it (the Dutch "ik ben droevig" is more from "I'm sad" a better translation would be "Het spijt me")
"Final Fantasy VII also gives us the classic boss name mistranslation "Safer Sephiroth." Gee, Square, you sure it's not supposed to be "SERAPH" as in the angel with those wings and all? "
This again? The katakana (セーファ, "seefa") cannot possibly be interpreted as Seraph. The name is actually meant to be Sefer Sephiroth, sefer being Hebrew for "book" and the whole name being a Kabbalah reference.
Calendar enthusiast
- Asian languages like Japanese are notoriously tricky to translate into any Western language, due to having a very different set of phonemes; the most well known is L / R ["luh" and "ruh"] which results in the stereotypical stupid Japanese accent, as the equivalent sound in Japanese is somewhere between both. There's numerous others, though; B / V, is / ith (probably most notable for producing 'Aeris') and others. This is aggravated by the difference in writing systems, as most Asian languages use either pictograms or syllabic alphabets, which means that foreign words can only be transliterated phonetically (i.e. by approximating how they sound like to a native speaker). If something's a proper noun, be prepared for guesswork.
OK, what do phonemes have to do with translation?
Ukrainian Red Cross Hide / Show Replies
The fact that words taken from English to Japanese and back often come through the phonemes mangled at best and incomprehensible at worst. For example, is / ith got us the giant power plant in the Armoured Core games called Megalis instead of Megalith. A dub of Bubblegum Crash managed to turn "Largo" into "Ralgo," made Sylia's surname "Stinglay" and gave us a B / V "Boomer" > "Voomer" which then became canon for some damn reason. Etc.
Edited by Evilest_Tim It is shameful for a demon to be working, but one needs gold even in Hell these days.
Sometimes it does completely remove meaning, however.. the towns of Exire and Luin in Tales Of Symphonia are obvious examples, as the first is a town full of exiles and the second gets ruined.
"Urobolus" shows up a few times as well in various games.
Occasionally you get a word so badly mangled you can't even tell it was supposed to be symbolically named.
Sometimes it does completely remove meaning, however.. the towns of Exire and Luin in Tales Of Symphonia are obvious examples, as the first is a town full of exiles and the second gets ruined.
"Urobolus" shows up a few times as well in various games.
Occasionally you get a word so badly mangled you can't even tell it was supposed to be symbolically named.
I wanted to amend the section about "Death Note" that deals with the element "mu". As the linked Other Wiki page states, in Japanese it's usu. used as a negative prefix "in-, un-, not ~", or independently (as said) to mean "naught, nothing(ness)", and it doesn't have in the current language the incredibly specific "wrong because of assumptions" meaning the page as it is now gives it.
It's correct that it should've been translated as "naught, nothing(ness)" here, though, but not because it's being used as a "your question is invalid" thing—it's being used as a noun for "nothing"; but I just wanted to point the above data out, as I'm a noob and afraid my fledgling attempts at editing would result in Epic Fail.
Third indented bullet in the Hellsing example seems somewhat confusing. At first read it seems like it's giving more examples of the trope on Alucard's glove, but then gives an example of how the German phrase is actually a correct translation! So after reading a few times it looks like it's meant to be a subversion. But is it just me or is it not worded very well?
Also, the main example looks a but overblown to me. There are some far worse example that I've seen on the page, yet the trope in Hellsing is described as "Horribly, horribly present".
Anybody else agree?
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Stuff like that is Word Cruft. Feel free to edit it out, along with anything you find that isn't really a bad translation so much as a case of several different translations possible, all plausible.
Quite honestly, I think this page is a lot less funny and a lot harder to follow than whoever wrote it thought. I mean sure, do the top paragraph in faux-bad-translation, but after that its not funny and it gets really difficult to understand.
Jokes are funny twice at the most, not the same exact joke over and over for a whole damn page.
Removed:
- Final Fantasy XIV: "To create characters on your FINAL FANTASY XIV service account, you must possess automatically continuous options."
This is just something people get confused over. 'Automatically Continuous Options' is a proper term as defined by the account agreements and so forth, it's just nobody bothers to read those. The above, in fact, is a perfectly fine translation in light of legal documentation, it's just bad phrasing on the part of someone who speaks English in the first place.
I originally added a similar explanation as a note on the page proper, but of course, we're supposed to remove irrelevant entries, aren't we? So now I've removed it, added this explanation here, and replaced the removed segment instead with the story about how the outsourced localisers mis-translated Chocobo as 'horse-bird'. And then 'Chocopo'.
Edited by ChibiKibou
This page needs major clean up, as most of these are either just Whining About Translation Choices You Don't Agree With or Gratuitous Foreign Language...
Perky Goth
I have trouble following what goes on here anymore. Was the complete blanking of the page, followed by a restoration with mostly generic examples actually authorized? And if so, is there anywhere to store obvious examples of mis-transliteration of words without care for what they're actually supposed to say, or are we letting all such things die?
Edited by Nezumi "That's ridiculous. What would a walrus do with a magic bag?" Pokeamida Hide / Show Replies
I'm curious about that too. What happened to this trope? An explanation would be nice.
I couldn't find any explanation from Ptorq about why they deleted all sections other then the Real Life one. Unless told otherwise, I'm going to assume they did it by mistake, so I've restored the deleted part.
What does the Welsh (in the page image sign) actually say? I can't tell if the original caption-writer was being sarcastic or not...
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The image hotlinks to a story by BBC News, so I imagine it's true. Apparently it was due to an automated email reply from a translator.
Edited by Evilest_Tim It is shameful for a demon to be working, but one needs gold even in Hell these days.
It is true. It reads exactly as the caption claims.
- a Welsh-speaker's opinion.
Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Needs Help
, started by neoYTPism on Apr 29th 2017 at 9:19:40 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman