With the novel of all (Fan Fiction)
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Unintentional(?) mistakes on the author's part
- Elvish isn't immune. A sadly lost fanfic involved a poem written in Elvish which, when translated back into English, came out containing lines like:"Woodpeckers of globes of a flat place, I order you to die."
- Many writers of anime fanfic are not fluent in Japanese. That does not stop them from using Japanese in ways that are jarringly wrong, particularly with respect to politeness levels and ways of addressing people.
- Hetalia: Axis Powers:
- The fandom sometimes suffers from this in a very special way. Since the main characters are all anthropomorphized representations of various countries, some authors decide to incorporate the respective primary languages of those countries into their fanfiction, which can go very wrong very easily. It's possible for several languages to get horribly mangled in a single story or even a single chapter.
- The entirety of One night of the drop of rain appears to have been run through a very bad machine translation program, which mangled the already-strange story so thoroughly that it became nearly incomprehensible. England outright says "TRANSLATION ERROR" at one point, and the rest of the text isn't much better off. There's a Dramatic Reading here.
- Hans von Hozel's stories are like this, due to the author being a German who tries to write fanfic in English. (Unless he's just messing with the reader.)
- The now sadly lost Star Wars fic Murder of Image was full of these, which added to its So Bad, It's Good appeal. Sample dialogue: "Out of here, you son-of-a-gun! In the Republic exist privacy, isn't it?"
- There exists a Pokémon fanfic, which the author also attempted to translate to French himselfnote , despite only having three years of French under his belt. The results were catastrophic.
- The infamous Beast Wars fanfic Dinobot's Old Technology, translated word-to-word from the writers native Canadian French to English via a dictionary with no corrections made otherwise. And even better it's written in script form, rewriting an episode (one of the best of the series) for no apparent reason. Rattrap: huh, maybe chopper face have changer his activation code again.
- Possible explanation for at least some of what was wrong with legolas by laura. "Mean while Gandalf is have a fun time trying to destroy the Dark Lord"?
- The author of The Prayer Warriors often includes parts that are in Latin, which he says that atheists and other stupid people will not be able to understand. However, the Latin is not well done, as "Ego vere fidelis in cuniculis" translates into "I am a true believer in mines note ." He later does an entire chapter in Danish, which comes out somewhat better.
- The Spanish community of Wattpad is rife with fanfics that were translated from English to Spanish just by dumping the original stories into the Google Translator without proper checking before publishing. While the translator can be accurate for the most part, there are many words whose meaning may change depending on the context, and the automatic translation may default to one that's not the intended meaning in the original one (which a reader fluent in both languages can easily spot). Additionally, translators consistently fail to get the characters' genders right, which makes readings confusing.
Invoked/in-universe examples
- In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, many of the characters who originally spoke English and learned Parseltongue the slow way (or the other way around) struggle to render English phrases in Parseltongue and translate them literally, losing all meaning. For instance, Tsh trying to express "girlfriend" only comes up with an expression that literally means "female friend".
- Played for Drama in "Helping ... Hands?", one of the fics in RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse. As part of an investigation into Zebra culture (in response to Zecora's support of Corona), Luna gives Trixie a translated book of Zebra magic rituals. Unfortunately, neither Luna nor Trixie realize that the scholars who did the translation did so in just about the most slapdash manner possible. In particular, almost none of the rites are correctly labeled. The first spell Trixie cast was supposed to turn Lyra into a zebra, instead it turns her into a human. Then Trixie casts what is supposed to be a general counterspell, and discovers that it's actually a gender-change spell. And things only go downhill from there.
- Played for Laughs in Farce Contact, a Star Trek: Enterprise fanfic, when Hoshi turns on the Universal Translator, Archer tests it:Jonathan Archer: I am Captain Archer of the starship Enterprise. We come in peace from the planet Earth.Universal Translator: Organ used for sight is the leading bowman of the prime vessel undertaking. We ejaculate in portion from the world of dirt.
- An in-universe example occurs in My Copy with a cult that's trying to summon Cthon using a magical prophecy that they translated to:The six whores
Pregnant with the master’s child
Shall carry them for nine months
And the servants shall feast on the unborn
Chthon shall return in glory.- When Gia sees the original along with the translation, she insists the translator is no longer allowed to speak and gets to work translating it properly.
Gia: The six peasant women will collect the seeds from the lands of the lord and at the summer's end the lord will in turn give a feast for them in his generosity... YOU FUCKING FUCK! IT’S NOT A MAGICAL RITUAL IT’S A GODDAMNED CATERING ORDER YOU IMBÉCILE. - A Game of Cat and Cat mentions a Japanese cult that wanted to call itself the Brotherhood of Evil, but in English. They screwed up the synonyms and it came out as the Fraternity of Naughtiness.
- Guys Being Dudes: Orre Hot Topic parody Subject Debate's Shadow Lugia shirt is supposed to say their name in Gratuitous Kantonian, but what's actually printed translates to "sex scandal". Arlo, being both of Kantonian ancestry and sophomoric, finds this hilarious and it's one of his factors in buying the shirt.
