Blind Idiot Translation / Video Games

Fun of the computer (Video Games)

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English Translations

• The Ace Attorney games are usually brilliantly translated and take Woolseyism to a new level of awesomeness. In some places, however, stupid mistakes tend to sneak in. The most well-known, from the bad ending of Justice For All, is "The "miracle" never happen."
  • The translation of the final case of Trials and Tribulations drops massively in quality compared to the rest of the game, with numerous lines which are not just mistranslated, but outright create entirely new plot points. Perhaps the most glaring example is Godot explaining the attempt he put together to stop Maya's assassination: He says he got Iris involved so that she could take the fall if they failed to "contain" Pearl. This is actually the exact opposite of the Japanese, which actually states that Iris was made an ally because she was Dahlia and Morgan's intended Fall Guy.
  • A random joke in Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth was left in, but rendered somewhat awkwardly. Examining the side of a building in the fifth case has Kay deliver a line beginning with "Thief Child says:", clearly a parody of Lang's catchphrase, but it makes no sense unless you realize the Lang Zi in "Lang Zi says:" literally translates as "Wolf Child".
  • Some mistakes are particularly noticeable because they're used consistently. For example, the final case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney uses "jurist" instead of "juror" throughout (they are very different things in a criminal court), and Investigations has "make due" instead of "make do" and "secretariat" instead of "secretary" (with that last one being especially ironic, since it was also used by a Malaproper in the first game, with the translation there presumably being intentional).
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies featured an almost identical mistake: the game revolves heavily around bombs and explosions and it repeatedly references "diffusing" a bomb. Bombs do not move their molecules from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration - not before they explode, anyway. The word they were looking for was "defuse," and it was not used once.
  • The eroge fan game Phoenix Drive is extremely notorious for this, as it was translated by the developers themselves, who either plugged the game's script through a machine translator or only know enough English to spell words properly without knowing about proper sentence structure or syntax.
• Afterimage: The game is originally in Chinese and had to be translated to other languages such as English. However, the English translation is far from perfect; there appears to be inconsistent spellings (for example, a boss is named "Souless Ode", yet Echo 6 uses the spelling "soulless"), wordplays that were lost due to misspellings (The plant creatures named "Laternlings" having lantern body parts), inconsistency with word choices or pronouns (Echo A begins with "That red-haired guy was out of her mind", even though the subject is later referred to with female pronouns), or outright typos (Echo 12 has the word "travellling", with three Ls), etc.
• The official English translation of the Alice in the Country of Hearts iOS port is poor. The entire game reads as though the translation effort amounted to putting it through Google Translate and then directly into the game. Needless to say, to the fans who were looking forward to an English translation, this very much counts as Bad Export for You. Some examples:
  Alice: I feel happy to be in the beautiful things. I look up the beauty.
  Alice: The laughter sounds flowers. It's maybe exaggerated, but it needs such a description.
  Boris: Especially at this amusement park. There is some sexy air we produce for only at night time.
• Alien Soldier's intro is full of this in the Japanese version, featuring many spelling errors such as "terrolist", "despatched", "continum", "whitch", and "intension". The European release rewrote it, though. Not that it makes any more sense...
• The Game Boy Color Animorphs game, despite being an American-created game that presumably needed no translating, was burdened with this to the point of its script being largely incomprehensible.
• ANNO: Mutationem: The initial release had most of the subtitles not matching with the voiced dialogue being said. This was later fixed in a patch, though there are still some minor examples of this. As well, the translation does leave something to be desired in places, such as some weird grammatical errors (such as missing full stops at the end of many sentences) and using "thru" instead of "through" in many cases, even on formal documents.
• The two games in the Armored Core 4 timeline gave us a huge power generator supposedly called "Megalis". Not "Megalith", then? Equally, Spirit of Motherwill is said to be armed with a "loaded shell cannon."
• Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky: For a game that was otherwise praised for being pretty nicely polished, it has quite a few English translation problems. One example is that in the fifth assignment, Marion sends you to a "slag graveyard," but then speaks several times of fighting "slugs." Another example: "This may be strange coming from me, but I believe you work to hard, Miss Quinn."
• Bad Dudes: "Rampant ninja related crimes these days, White House is not the exception."
• Done intentionally in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden: the plural form of "gun" is always written as "gun's", and people who wield them are called "gun'sbrasters" because they "brast" things from their "gun's". (This also extends to the "company" who made the game, who are technically known as "Tales of Game's".)
• Battle Rangers, a.k.a. Bloody Wolf included such gems as:
  • "You! Invaders! Get you the hot bullets of shotgun to die!" (Idiomatic translation: "Intruder! Prepare to eat hot lead!")
  • "Opp! I've got foods! Chuck, chuck..."
  • "I've got medicine! Must be good for wounds!"
  • "Hey! Same words to you!"
  • "Haha. Here's goes bloody sight!"
  • "Come on boy, you've got to be serious!"
  • "You stupid! You die!"
  • "Kuuh! You are the loser!!"
  • "Hugh! Me to lose???"
• Beatcats OFFICIAL FANCLUB has a few weird and unnatural sounding phrases in the character dialogue and ui.
  Let's challenge the LIVE with training well!
• beatmania IIDX:
  • "The special mission available!"
  • Also, basically every English-language song from Japan.
• The manual for Bionic Commando. "You can shoot at wide range but reach is shoot (short)". As well as much of the dialog in-game:
  • "So you think you can destroy the main system? You have no chance!"
  • "Maybe we can find good weapon we can use".
  • "Ok, we are going to open the door of the boos's room".
  • "I take this bazooka", shouted by the ally soldier who actually gives you said weapon.
  • "This base will explod in 60 sec".
• "YOU'RE WINNER !" from Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was the result of most of the game's development being outsourced to a Ukrainian company by Stellar Stone.
• Book of Mario: Thousands of Doors and its prequel invoke this with ridiculous Google translations for every line of dialogue, creating hilarious scenarios and a mess of a plot.
• The translation of the first Breath of Fire game, while not that bad, is not good in any sense of the word. Item and spell names are particularly fun due to a character restriction leading to gems like "ProtnA", "Mrbl5", and "Pararai" (which itself is a mistranslation, clearly meant to be "paraly", being a paralyze spell and all).
• Breath of Fire II has an infamously bad translation (Fishing Lod, anyone?), even for Capcom. It should also be noted that absolutely nothing was changed in the GBA port. Even one instance where a regular party member's name was replaced with a placeholder flag. The GBA remake's translation is even worse. Would you trust "The Destined Child" vs. "The Fatal Child"? (Though in the EU version, Ryu is always referred to as the "Destined Child".)
• Bust-a-Move 4 (the English localization of Puzzle Bobble 4) is full of endearingly awful "Blind Idiot" Translation, particularly in the story mode dialogue.
• The arcade game Captain America and the Avengers recreates Marvel Comics' superhero comics of the time in video game form, down to the all-American superheroes and their World of Ham dialogue (with voice acting!). Thus, it stands out when the heroes encounter a giant mechanical octopus and the game identifies it as "Mech. Taco", a name that only makes sense in Japanese where the word tako means "octopus".
  • Much of the aforementioned dialogue, for that matter, was clearly not written or translated by native English speakers, such as "You cannot escape!" being met with the immortal response "You will be the one escaping!". The most obvious example, however, is not voice-acted: "Why should it goes well?"
  • The ending also writes the famous catchphrase "Avengers assemble!" as "Avengers unite!", despite the voice actor using the correct phrase.
• Castlevania II: Simon's Quest: The game was already full of vague or straight-up lying NPCs — the English translation added some more by accident. Thoroughly dissected here.
• Chaos Wars had an official translation that was... just awful. For one thing, the voice acting was performed by the friends and family of the translator, but it's most notable for the characters from Shadow Hearts. "Yuri" became "Uru" and Karin became Karen, which is understandable since that's their names in Japanese... but "Nikolai", a Russian man, was given the name "Nicole".
• Dark Chronicle 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 stand", which literally translates as "electric stand".
• Deadly Premonition usually has a very good translation into English. However, the same can't be said for various signs in the game world, leading to the hospital level having info signs like this:
  YES!YOUR DOCTOR TOLD US THAT YOU AER TO BE OUR PATIENT.ACCEPT OUR ENTHUSIASTIC CONGRATULATIONS AND WELL WISH ON YOUR COMING CVENT... AND BE ASSURED THAT WE HAVE A VERY PERSONAL INTEREST IN YOUR CASE AND HAVE ALREADY TAKEN STEPS TO SEE TO TI THAT YOUR STAY IN THE PALO ALTO HOSPITAL WILL BE PAY US A SOCIAL VISIT BEFORE YOU ENTER?WE WANT TO MEET AND GREET YOU. FOR YOURS!
• The initial English version of Demon's Souls released in China had flavor text that was borderline gibberish (although it's generally comprehensible). Most was fixed in the USA localisation.
• The Spiritual Successor of Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, has its own little bits of Engrish nonsense, most famously the "YOU DEFEATED" message that flashes upon killing a boss, or the "YOU REVIVED TO THE HUMAN" upon reversing Hollowing, both of which were eventually patched to say "VICTORY ACHIEVED" and "HUMANITY RESTORED" instead. Also, as with Demon's Souls, several item descriptions are bizarre or just downright wrong, such as the Tiny Being's Ring, which claims to give HP regeneration but actually gives a small HP increase (this one is only fixed in the Remastered version of the game).
• In the English version of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, a lot of the lower-level swords are called by generic names, such as "katana" or "rapier". But the sai, rather than simply being called a sai, is called a "Rhino" instead. (This is because the Japanese word for rhinoceros is "sai".)
• In the H-Game Divi-Dead, when confronted by an obnoxiously smug character at one point, the protagonist thinks "What a fart-blasting scrotum this guy is!"
• The Game Boy Advance dungeon crawler Dokapon: Monster Hunter has a hilariously awful translation — it seems more like a corny fan-made effort than a genuine translation. "Gems" include: "Fire breathed practice alcoholism", "Cat to hold is special skill," and "Make some status effect happen."
• This is how Donkey Kong got his name. Shigeru Miyamoto was looking for a word in English that meant "stubborn" or "foolish" to match the character's personality.
• The disclaimer, originally from the Bullet Hell shooter DoDonPachi, shown on Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: "Violator and subject to severe penalties will be prosecutedt to the full extent of the jam."("jam" is "law" with the first and last letters inverted). The boss warning sign from the first game says: "This is not similation. Get ready to destoroy the enemy. Target for the weak points of (the) f**kin' machine. Do your best you have ever done."
• Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors 2 generally avoids this, but has a few standout oddities among its localization.
  • One of the missions in Gohan's Story Mode is "Zet Sword", as in the Z Sword. This is presumably a mistranslation of either the weapon's Japanese name (ゼットソード, Zetto Sōdo) or "Zeta" (the English version of the Dragon Ball manga called it the Zeta Sword).
  • Goku and Vegeta's Team Attack sees them fuse into Vegito and use the ki attack that the Budokai series named Spirit Sword. Except here it's inexplicably known as Super Bajit Sword, with "Bajit" a likely corruption of Bejitto.
  • The names of Cooler's Armored Squadron get mangled a bit: Dore is "Doray", Neiz is "Neize", and Salza keeps Sauzer from the original Japanese (something shared with Budokai 3, wherein one of Cooler's special moves is Sauzer Blade).
• Here's the ending text to Namco's Dragon Spirit, in its entirety: "Zawell's ambition was crushed by the brave attempts of the warrior Amul and bluedragon to rescue princess Alicia from the hands of her captors. The kingdom cloud ultimatery restore peace. People were rejoiced to start from a nightmare, thus celebrating the restoration and jazzing up with joy. The evil perished, and the light came back to the kingdom again, as if celebrating its prosperity and happiness...." And you wonder why it took so long to bring win comments to Tekken...
• Dynasty Warriors: Gundam:
  • The second game suffers from this in utterly stupid ways. Usually, the Koei franchise features good translations, but whoever translated this game just didn't recognize traditional English phrases.
    Cecily: "It looks like we'll make it back safe... how about some toast when we get back home?"
    Mission title: "Peace Singing Singstress"
    Kamille: "I could be dead by morning. I should have changed my underwear."
    Shinn Asuka: "I'm more than a match for these guys! Who's laughing at Shinn now?!"
  • One particularly bad case has Kira Yamato triumphantly declaring "Thanks to this sword Lacus gave me, I can start kicking butt!" This is extremely out-of-character for the very much Reluctant Warrior Technical Pacifist Kira. The line in Japanese was a more solemn declaration that he would use his new weapon to fight in his own way, against the injustices he saw in the world.
  • Dynasty Warriors: Gundam Reborn has several unfortunate mistranslations in its "Quiz" missions, which can lead to English-speaking players selecting the wrong answers. Setsuna, for instance, is identified as a "Pure Innovade", whereas anyone familiar with Gundam 00 would have called him a "True Innovator" (there is a significant difference in-series between an Innovade and an Innovator). There's also a case where Char says "Good girl, wouldn't want you to waste your talents" when praising a younger pilot... except he says this to male characters as well. The word Char uses in Japanese actually means "child", not specifically "girl".
• Edna & Harvey: The Breakout: An especially shameful example, as the original German game gets a big deal of its charm due to the characters’ witty remarks and untranslatable puns.
  • In the original version of the game, a kite was identified as a dragon in the English translation, due to the German words for both being similar (Drache vs. Drachen). It was fixed in the remake.
  • One that wasn't fixed in the remake was a bench being identified as "Bank", because in German, the word "Bank" can mean either "Bank" or "Bench". If you have Edna "talk to" the bench, she says a line about needing to talk to her bank - a neat pun in German, but a complete non-sequitur in English.
  • When Aluman asks Edna how she plans to get through the main gate, one of her options is to suggest building a hot air balloon out of styrofoam. Aluman reacts as if this were a perfectly reasonable and obvious solution, explains why it still wouldn't work, and says (in the original German), "You'll have to come up with a less obvious solution." The translators missed the joke entirely and rendered his line in English as "You'll have to think of something less far-fetched", the complete opposite of what he actually said.
  • If Edna comments on Mr. Frock having a strange name, his response in the English version is "It is meant for a human", which makes no sense. What he actually says in the German version is "Maybe for a human."
• The adventure game Escape From Delirium includes an English translation by the German developers that is rather awkward. Of note, while the German version includes an on-screen English newspaper headline subtitled in German, the English subtitles simply replicate the contents of the headline—only to misspell the first word.
• While the Fan Translation of the original Fate/stay night has been heavily praised and has been largely been treated as a canon translation by Type Moon, there are a few expressions that don’t translate perfectly (all of which have become Memetic Mutations in their own right). Some rather famous examples include:
  Shirou: People die when they are killed...
  Or,
  Rin: Wow, the Archer class really is made up of archers!
• The most complete Fan Translation of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 prior to Project Exile isn't particularly great, but the most infamous mistake, the title of Chapter 11x^note which involves Imperial troops manning balistraria halls in a dungeon in the hopes that the magic and bow potshots happen to kill the Liberation Army, is unique in that it was the result of not recognising a mistake in the original Japanese. The translator misinterpreted a transposition error in this chapter's Japanese title, マーダーホレス ("Mādāhoresu"; a slightly botched attempt to transliterate "murder holes"), as the name of a Last Stand siege warfare tactic, leading to the utterly nonsensical and laughable Word Purée Title "Murder Hollace" - "hollace", of course, being a Perfectly Cromulent Word with no relation to any sort of siege warfare tactics, medieval or otherwise. In Project Exile, this chapter was renamed to "Balistrariae" because Cirosan couldn't use this ridiculous title but didn't like "Murder Holes" either.
• Garfield: A Week of Garfield is a Famicom game made in Japan. Before the final level, Jon says, "Let's challenge." An earlier level has "Look for Odie at downtown", and the game ends with the line "Congratulation boys." There's also some statements that make no sense in context, like "What happened?" and "Can I help you?" (between levels as Garfield approaches Jon).
• The Nintendo Hard Ghostbusters-licensed game ends with a single screen reading "Conglaturation!". Also:
  "You have completed a great game. And prooved the justice of our culture. Now go and rest our heroes!!"
• GP-1 Part II for the SNES, a motorcycle racing game; multiple tracks are based upon circuit configurations that existed at the time, however under generic names. Fuji Speedway (View Sight), Sportsland Sugo (Mountain), Tsukuba (Twin Head) and Suzuka (Japan) are represented in this title and all take place in Japan. However, Suzuka Circuit being simply titled "Japan" is rather odd as the other three Japanese circuits have unique names and are all in Japan as well. Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya is another notable instance of odd naming as the circuit is simply titled "Europe" even though there are multiple European tracks in the game. "View Sight" seems to be a mix-up between Fujifilm company and Fuji Speedway or Mt. Fuji. Finally, when you complete the aforementioned Japanese tracks mentioned above as part of the first act of the game, your manager tells you "Well done at the US Championships!" What?
• In the English version of German RPG Gothic, a certain type of health-restoring berry is labelled 'Blueberries'. They're red.
• Halo Zero experiences this:
  Remember, kill the covenants !
• The original Harvest Moon for the Game Boy and SNES has the famous line "Confirm the origin of fire!" upon inspecting a stove. This is an overly literal translation of "火の元かくにん", which was likely intended to mean "check to make sure the burner is off".
• Harvest Town, a Chinese-made Farm Life Sim, doesn't have the best English localisation. Most of the sentences look like something that came out from Google Translate, with odd word choices, sentence flow and poor grammar. Examples include:
  He works and lives in the bar, keeping pursuing music.
  If you invite him to a meal only out of courtesy, he won't be courteous.
  His bar locates not far from the school.
• Kemono Friends Picross on the Switch, despite not having that much text to begin with, somehow has this with the titles for the puzzles. These range from fairly minor ("Mexico Salamander" instead of "Axolotl," "Ratel" instead of "Honey Badger," etc.) to slightly more odd, but understandable ("Japari Bun" became "Japariman," short for "Japari Manjuu," manjuu being a type of traditional Japanese pastry), to downright ridiculous ("Narwhal," which is "ikkaku," which just means "one horn" in Japanese, somehow became "UNICORN WHALE").
• The earlier games in The King of Fighters franchise were infamously full of this, leading to multiple Narmy moments.
• The Kingdom Hearts games usually have very solid translations, but sometimes mistakes slip through. In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Sora has several Combination Attacks where he rides atop his Dream Eaters, and they all ended up having "ライド" (Raido) rendered as "Raid" rather than "Ride". This is notable because "Raid" (レイド (Reido) has always referred to the recurring Throwing Your Sword Always Works line of attacks.
  • The English translation of Kingdom Hearts II misspelled Braig as Bleig, Dilan as Dilin, and Aeleus as Eleus. Also, a translation mistake created a plot hole when Goofy said that King Mickey banished Pete to another dimension a long time ago, when Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep shows it was actually Queen Minnie that did it. The word Goofy used in Japanese is a generic term that basically means "His/Her Majesty", and the translators chose the wrong gender for the translation.
  • There's one line in the first game that proved tricky to translate, due to awkwardness with Japanese word order, so they created a new line instead — which ended up becoming a What Happened to the Mouse? incident. Specifically, when Donald and Goofy are about to leave to find the key bearer, he asks Daisy "Can you take care of the...?" and she cuts him off with "Of course." Take care of the... what? Whatever it is, it's never stated. His line was originally going to be something like "We'll find the king", which in Japanese word order would be "The king, we will find." Donald started "Daisy, the king..." and she replied "Of course [you will]". However, translating this would be impossible — preserving the word order would make it sound awkward, and translating it as "We'll find..." wouldn't preserve the meaning (making it clear that Donald is talking about finding the king).
  • In Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, the Lethal Frame attack, which briefly freezes the target in time, was mistranslated as Lethal Flame. The 1.5 ReMix version fixed this.
  • When Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix was officially translated into English as part of the 2.5 ReMix collection, one of the puzzles, originally named "EDGE" in Japanese, had its name changed to "Frontier". This is fine on its own, but it appears to have been solved by mass find-and-replace, causing the name of one of the Reaction Commands used during Roxas's fight against Axel at the end of the prologue to change from "Burst Edge" (which is what it was called in the original version of the game, in both languages) to "Burst Frontier", which is a rather nonsensical name.
• In a literal case of a blind idiot translation, the English translation of one of the tablets in La-Mulana 2 gave specific instructions but accidentally left out the line that told you where to perform said instructions. On another tablet in a different area, the translator accidentally mixed up the kanji for "waterfall" (滝) with the kanji for "dragon" (竜), leading the player to search for a dragon which doesn't exist. Fortunately, both of these errors were quickly patched out.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky's translation is extremely competent and high quality, but even Xseed makes mistakes, however minor. The dish "mille crepe" is incorrectly romanized as "milk crepe", for instance... Although since the dish in question uses milk as an ingredient, it still makes sense.
• Whoever was responsible for the translation of Lost Odyssey translated the game well enough, but either forgot or didn't have time to translate all the achievements, resulting in about half of them being left in Japanese (both the name and the description). So unless you speak Japanese or look it up online, you'll have no idea how to get those achievements.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: In the English localization's opening cutscene of the final boss fight, Zelda says that Dark Beast Ganon is the result of Calamity Ganon giving up on reincarnation, while in the original Japanese version she says that Dark Beast Ganon is the result of Calamity Ganon refusing to give up on reincarnation.
• The unreleased NES game Makai Island from Capcom has more than a few translation errors, but perhaps the most glaring is the name for the first island in the game. Looking at the Japanese manual would clue in the translation as Cook Island, but as you arrive at the island, you're greeted with "WELCOME TO CUCK ISLAND".
• The obscure Infogrames role-playing game Mandragore, originally released in French, requires the player to type in a secret phrase in order to be able to fight the final boss. The password can be gleamed from the song stanzas collected throughout the game, whose first letters spell out "IN DEMONEM", which sounds quite coherent, so an observant player can figure it out. In the English version, the translated stanzas' first letters spell out... "TNSADWOAT", and this is what you need to type for the final battle. Good luck figuring out that this is the password.
• One of the items in Miitopia is called Morning Vestments. Said item is not "morning"-themed whatsoever. It's supposed to be Linen Vestments, but the translation team mistook Asa, which can be either "linen" or "morning", as the latter. It's a bit strange, too, since they managed to get another linen-based clothing properly named in the English localization (the Linen Robe, for the curious).
• Mystic Messenger's main routes are not an example of this trope; the translation was remarkably solid, especially for a script involving so much slang. However, the Christmas DLC route appears to have either been a rush job, or given to a different translator. The subjects of sentences are frequently mixed up, characters constantly refer to people whom they're directly addressing in the third person, English phrases are misused in ways that blur the meaning, and it's really inconsistent about what type of ellipses are used.
• My Summer Car is completely in Finnish with English subtitles if necessary. However, these tend to be very literal, especially the curses. For example, "vitun mulkku" means something like "fucking prick", but the subtitles use a much more literal translation instead, namely, "You dick of a pussy!" Also, things aren't translated that shouldn't, for example, names. For example, "Isontalon Antti ja Rannanjärvi" refers to the two criminals Antti Isotalo and Antti Rannanjärvi, but the subtitles make "Andy of the large house and the Shore of lake" out of them.
• Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters: Owing to the ESRB rating not including a "Language" warning, all instances of vulgarity were patched out of the English localization post-release. This includes changing the name of the Bastard Sword weapon — which is an actual type of sword — to "Brute Sword".
• One Piece: Unlimited Adventure
  • When Shanks activates his special attack, he says, "I won't forgive those who hurt their friends!" He should have said "my friends," since the line is a reference to how he and his crew tolerated a group of mountain bandits who made fun of and poured drinks on them, but quickly took them down when they tried to hurt Luffy.
  • At the start of Aokiji's second phase, he says "There's no ship to take in... shall I kill you now?" This seems to be a mistranslation of how he told Luffy that since he didn't have a ship to take Luffy back as a prisoner, he'd have to kill him(although Aokiji ended up sparing Luffy)
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Not in the game itself, but its official Japanese website. It contains Gratuitous English captions such as "ONLY YOUR MARIO," "IF TROUBLED BY 'MYSTERY'," "A STAIRS," "FAMILIARITY CHARACTER," and refers to the game as "Parper Mario RPG."
• Pathologic, though liked by many, fared worse in the English language markets due to having an infamously inconsistent English translation (one that was probably outsourced by the devs). The translation can vary a lot, depending on which of the three characters you choose to play, and even depending on which day of the campaign you're playing at the moment. Some bits are basically an accurate, professional-level translation, while some dip into clunky, seemingly machine-translated bits that make the dialogue needlessly surreal (which is saying something, given the already surreal horror nature of the game), famously described by H.Bomberguy as "Translated from Russian by a mystical rat that only speaks in riddles". The official remake and rerelease in 2019 finally replaced the original broken translation with a completely new one.
• Persona 3, including FES and Portable:
  • The Portable version's English localization, while as good as the Playstation 2 versions for the most part, has translation hiccups on some lines, not helped by its Visual Novel format adding more text and the female main character's route on top of that. Very few certain lines do not sync with the voiceover, there are typos and missing punctuation marks, and, in a couple minor events, outright untranslated lines. The most notable ones seem to be "You told Junpei of you rfeelings." from Junpei's rooftop event and "Wanna go at it agian?" from Rio's hangout event, as these were fixed via patch for its remastered port (though modders beat them to it first), but other errors remain.
  • From the male protagonist's route in Portable, Yuko's Rank 8 S. Link event renders the line ">Yuko is a bit troubled." in broken Japanese (due to the kanji characters being removed). Another instance of untranslated text comes from talking to Fuuka in the dorm on 7/25 or 7/26. In this case, the translators forgot to translate Fuuka's response to the player's "No" option on the latter date.
  • In Portable, the "Attack" description on the battle menu for Strike-type and Pierce-type weapons repeats the "equipped" part.
  • Remnants of the male route still show up in the female route, like as in the intro to the Optional Boss fight with the Velvet Room attendant and Yukari using a voice clip meant to refer to the male MC when "I was scared, too." is picked during the first hospital scene.^note Both of these in particular were fixed in the remaster edition, though at the expense of voice acting in the former as there is no way to redub the fixed lines. But special mention goes to one particular flavor text on the battle result screen. The bright color scheme and low resolution make it hard to read at a glance, but the text "He is an uncanny fellow!" under the Bonus EXP text is the same even for the female MC. One might think it is because there is only one graphic file and the developers did not bother to make another, but nope, both main characters' menu graphics are separate, including the Bonus EXP flavor text. This was fixed in the remastered port by changing the text to "Great! Nice going!"
  • The Oracle command and the Summer Dream fusion spell were reworked in Portable, but the English translators just copied the battle text from the PlayStation 2 version. This is often mistaken for a bug, when it is actually the battle messages not matching the new effects.
  • The description for the Herculean Strike skill mistakenly refers to it as a Slash-type attack, never mind the name and icon used.
  • The remastered edition of Portable does not seem to bother with the English translation for the "good ending" texts (outside the default one) that are added to this version^note In the original, only the voice is played as the screen fades to white. In the remaster, for possibly accessibility reasons, a text box is overlaid to show what they were saying.. For the New Game Plus endings, the speaker's name label is untranslated, in full display, during what would be an emotional ending. Akihiko's ending suffers this the worst, as not only is his name label untranslated, but also his ending text does not match his dub voice clip, apparently using a direct translation of his original Japanese line as if unaware that his dub line already exists.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Red and Blue:
    • Pallet Town is a bit of a strange one. It's less of a translation and more of a botched Woolseyism. In Japanese it's "masarataun," a transcription of "Masala Town." Masala is a blend of Indian spices, meant to reference the other towns in the game, which are mostly named after flowers and/or colors. So, in the English version, they named the starting town after an artist's set of paint colors. Except that would be spelled "palette." A pallet is a type of mattress or, as it's more often used today, those wooden platforms on which products are piled for storage or transport.
    • The move "Double Team" seems to imply that your mon is working with another team member, but this is not the case nor were double battles a feature yet. This one seems to be intended as "Double Image" considering the animation and the increased evasion.
  • For several generations, the move Feint Attack was misspelled as Faint Attack. The literal translation would be Sneak Attack, so the former clearly makes more sense, but this apparently slipped through because it's a Dark-type move and the animation shows the attacker disappearing temporarily, so "Faint" makes some degree of sense. This first appeared in Pokémon Gold and Silver and wasn't fixed until Pokémon X and Y. Strangely, the trading-card game never made this error.
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, one of the Pokétch apps is called the "Trainer Counter", which... actually keeps track of Poké Radar chains, instead of having anything to do with Trainers. The cause of this is that the Poké Radar's Japanese name is "Pokémon Tracer" (ポケモントレーサー), which can be shortened to "Poké Trace" (ポケトレ). ポケトレ is also the shortened Japanese form of "Pokémon Trainer" (ポケモントレーナー, in fact the two differ by only one character), hence the confusion. It was properly renamed to "Chain Counter" in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield introduced a new move called Fishious Rend, and the move description mentions the user rending the target with its gills. Up to this point, everything seems fine... except for the fact the move getting extra damage if the user's ability is Strong Jaw, which increases the power of biting moves... which means Fishious Rend is a biting move even though nothing implies such a thing. The move's called Gill Bite in Japanese, and every other translation correctly leaves a biting word in both the move's name and description, leaving the English version alone with a mistake that can affect gameplay.
• When a Power Instinct 2 machine first boots up
  FIRST BOOT UP IS.
  FIRST EEP ROM DEFAULT INITIALIZED.
• The English translation of the rather obscure action-RPG Prince of Qin is quite mangled, though it mostly manages to convey the intended message. There's a lot of unintentional humour and redundancy and Accidental Innuendo, though:
  -I am a fat lamb? Only if you have the capability!
  -I want to take his life because I want to!
  -But generally speaking, it is not proper to burn so many books and kill so many people.
  -Now Wacheng has been conquered and I have no worries in my rear.
  -See brother, this is troublesome. However, it's just small trouble. I don't want to bring you any trouble.
  -You bold escaped criminal!
• Raiden V's localization has Engrish up the wazoo, e.g.
  • "The speed of enemy destruction is perfect."
  • "Descend and pursue the destruction of the target!"
  • "Enemy flight battleships are approaching?! Good luck!"
  • "Check that the enemy has suspended action and fallen."
• RC Helicopter is full of awkward sentences like "Your challenge is failing" after the player fails a level, or the girl the player meets during the nighttime school levels describing the ghosts as "funny".
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil:
    • The very first game was dubbed by native English speaking voice actors, but overseen by a Japanese director. Thus, you get such lines as 'This hall is dangerous! There are terrible demons! Ouch!' (and yes, he does say the word 'ouch').
    • "I'm going back to the pharmaceutical room." She actually means the chemical room where you mix the V-Jolt, not the medical room in the main house.
    • "You, the master of unlocking..." "You were almost a Jill sandwich!".
    • Trying to use an item where it can't be used in the remake results in "It's not necessary use this now".
    • An optional line from Wesker if Jill immediately tries to back out of the dining room: "Investigate if you hear any gunfire." He's supposed to be referring to the gunfire you just heard in the previous cutscene, and how he's counting on you to investigate that.
    • Near the beginning, Jill says "now it's Wesker's time to disappear" rather than something like "and now Wesker's gone too," turning an originally innocuous comment into something that sounds like a threat.
    • "The STARS are going to be finished soon! Someone is a traitor!" (when playing as Jill) "Double-crosser!" (when playing as Chris)
    • "We need to blow this place up. I'm going to set off the triggering system for a bomb." (I'm going to activate the Self-Destruct Mechanism.) Who set up us the bomb?
    • Barry's hint that the acid grenades are more effective on living enemies like Hunters and Neptunes rather than zombies turned into "It's a weapon! It's REALLY powerful, especially against living things!"
    • And the Grenade Launcher is called a "Bazooka" in the original.
    • When you have to enter the second password in the Umbrella lab, you are told to "Try enter password". Strangely, this prompt was kept in for the remake, despite said remake having a much better translation.
  • Resident Evil 2 has pretty bad translations in parts too:
    • "We lost contact with them over ten days ago. Chris, Jill, Barry, every last STARS team member has disappeared. We should have listened to them." Of course, their communication was cut off due to the Zombie Apocalypse.
    • "You think we can get upstairs (to the other side) through this shaft (hole)?"
    • "I cleared the wreckage (debris) that was blocking the corridor."
    • "Only there's a wrecked car barring the entrance". It's a van, not a car, and although it blocks the door, it's not "wrecked".
    • "We now have access to the back of the parking lot (the back of the basement, that is)."
    • "Her forehead's burning up (she's got a fever). I've got to hurry before the embryos (there's only one embryo actually) pupate (metamorphoses)."
    • "I heard {my dad} call my name." But wasn't he already mutated? I.e. What Happened to Daddy? Plot hole?
    • This was before both Sherry and the player were able to find out her dad is the monster stalking them.
    • "Did your mom give you something called 'G Virus'?" Sounds like "did she infect/inject you with it"? Wait, actually, it sounds more like "did she give you chlamydia?" Squicky.
    • "We've finally arrived. There must be something hidden here." Actually, they haven't quite arrived at the laboratory yet.
    • "We're inside Umbrella's secret lab." Underground research facility, not a lab itself.
    • "Someone tried to kill me": actually, she was trying to kill Ada and Leon took the bullet. "Ada... went after the sniper," i.e., the gunman.
    • Claire to Sherry in the 2nd scenario ending: "You look terrible."
    • "Which one is the right switch?" "Sherry! Push that switch over there!" They mean a button. There's no actual lever/switch to flick up or down.
  • Even Code Veronica didn't have the best translation.
  • Resident Evil 4 fares a lot better than previous games, but there are still some clunky and unnatural moments. When Leon firsts meets a frightened Ashley, she shouts "Don't come!" — likely an attempt to shorten "Don't come any closer!", when something like "Stay back!" would have made more sense.
  • A couple of the most narm-worthy quotes from the game make an appearance in Dead Rising, specifically one of the stores. Reading the description, you'd have to wonder if Capcom did the bad acting on purpose.
  • The English version of Resident Evil Archives, a companion book to the first five games in the main series, suffers from several translation mistakes, as well as an overall poor attempt at localizing the book's content. One section of the book replaces all instances of the word "biohazard" with "Resident Evil", even when the context doesn't warrant it, giving us such gems like the "Umbrella Resident Evil Countermeasure Service" and "a Resident Evil outbreak has been detected".
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was even more gratuitous: "It is not enough to make the device to work". "Mikhail appears to be in pain and suffering". "A dried up pumpkins are placed here". "It can be used for the power source of the large sized machinery".
• The official English translation of RPG Maker XP has some translation oddities. For example, the stat Dexterity is translated as "Dextality". The Move and Stop animations were also somehow swapped together.
  • RPG Maker VX and VX Ace don't get away mistake-free either. While the stats and interface are largely functional, the skill and enemy names in VX tend to be treated this way; "Sickle Weasel" (Kamaitachi), "Newclear" (Nuclear), "Willowisp" (Will o' Wisp), "Gayzer" (Gazer), Frame Shield (Flame Shield), and the default text for Non-Lethal K.O. status being "[Charname] is knockout!" are all notable in VX. VX Ace is even more egregious about this, with "Breath Weapon", "Breath Armor", and "Divine Breath" — which are mistakes VX did not make. Nevermind some of the default character titles ("Dark Green Aim", what?) and backgrounds ("His youth is bound by hatred. He acts like a wise-crack due to his life"). At least these errors are all on things that can be easily corrected.
• SOS: The game has a rather shoddy translation. Not only does the intro have the bizarre line "The voyage will turn from ecstasy to catastrophy.", but the names of some characters are mistranslated by the credits.
• Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment's English translation, while grammatically sound (for the most part), is needlessly verbose, full of Accidental Innuendo, and has some incredibly confusing word structure. Buying and selling, for instance, is referred to as "commodity transactions," and visiting rooms is apparently the most fun an NPC can have. The English language option included in the Asian release fits this trope to a T.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The English dub of Sonic Adventure 2 has problems. Unlike the original Sonic Adventure, the dialogue was not rewritten for English, but translated. This led to various odd-sounding sentences in the game. One example is near the end of the game, where the Biolizard teleports outside of Cannon's Core. Shadow then exclaims "Is that what Chaos Control is?" as if the Biolizard teleporting somehow gave Shadow a knowledge of how Chaos Control worked. The intended context was "Was that Chaos Control?". One line that really screamed that out was 'But, there's no way you could use the Chaos Control using an emerald that is fake!' And then there's the message that appears on-screen at the start of the battles with the Biolizard and FinalHazard: "The Prototype of the Ultimate Life".
  • This also extends to Eggman's English voice actor using the word "yosh" when clearing a level or petting a Chao. "Yosh" can be translated from Japanese as "Yeah!" or "All right!"
  • Many times, when characters refer to the Chaos Emeralds, they use the singular when they probably meant to use the plural.
  • The English version of Sonic Heroes had Tails saying "Look at all those Eggman's robots!", presumably because the scriptwriters originally used the established term "Badnik" and changed their minds later on without appropriately changing this line. The translators also mixed up "robot" and "clone" in Team Dark's ending.
    (Omega is about to destroy a room full of Shadow clones, on Shadow's orders)
    Rouge: Hey Omega... did I ever tell you that... Shadow is a robot... and... oh, never mind. Good luck.
    Omega: You know about cloning. The original must exist somewhere.
  • Before the developers had settled on a name for Sonic, he was referred to as "Mr. Needlemouse". The Japanese word for "hedgehog" is "harinezumi". Guess what a literal translation of that would yield.
• The English localization of sora by ΩTH, as it has poorly-written dialogue and noticeable moments of Idiot Programming. Fans of SUGURI weren't happy about these unfortunate turns of events, especially considering the earlier SUGURI games had perfectly fine localizations by Rockin' Android. The fact that ΩTH was in fact a Troll probably didn't help matters. Thankfully, it later received a MUCH better localization from Fruitbat Factory.
• In Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2, you're sometimes referred to with male pronouns as the female protagonist.
• The NES tarot "game" Taboo: The Sixth Sense is rife with nonsensically bad English, which is something of a liability when a game consists almost exclusively of reading off written fortunes. Even more vexing is that the game isn't Japanese (the game was made by Rare, which is British), so there's no apparent reason for the confusing text.
• Terranigma has one blatantly bad translation that made a section of the game unnecessarily tedious to get through, while the other translation mainly caused some chuckles.
  • The Sylvain Castle has the four dolls circling Ark while singing the kagome, kagome nursery rhyme, but stop circling when the nursery rhyme ends. Ark has to attack the doll behind him, until they are defeated. The problem is that kagome, kagome is unknown to most non-Japanese players, so this entire nursery rhyme gimmick was difficult to translate, but there were ways to work around it.
    1. Creating an English nursery rhyme that uses the same number of characters as the original Japanese, leaving the rhyme to end at the same time as it's finished. Though this would be incredibly tricky to do, since the English language is more verbose when compared to Japanese.
    2. Writing an English nursery rhyme that is either as short or as long as necessary, then working alongside the coders to have the dolls stop in time for the text match their spin.
    3. Opt for a literal, word-for-word translation of the rhyme in question that created absolutely nonsensical lines to Western players, leave the dolls' spin-cycle alone and have them stop in the middle of the rhyme, and keep the clue on having to attack the one behind Ark in the last line, which no player would see because of the spin-cycle and translation being out of sync. This forced players to either perform trial and errors until they figure out the right thing or to stand for a long time, waiting for the rhyme to finally end and tell the player what to do. And this was the picked option. And the translation ended up being absolutely baffling anyway. The pivotal final line was translated as "Who's in the eyes of the one behind?"
  • The game consistently uses 'to arouse' and its various forms instead of the more commonly used 'to wake/to awaken'. While this is technically not wrong, the translators seem to be unaware that 'arouse' also has a sexual meaning to it. This did lead to inadvertently innuendo-laden dialogue, most infamously being Beruga's line.
    "I thank you for arousing me."
• The English translators for Super Robot Wars V seem to have some kind of grudge against ellipsis; they deleted or replaced nearly every instance of ellipsis in the game. Even when the characters say nothing but ellipsis, they still give them something to say. This has the unfortunate side effect of turning "shocked, disbelieving silence" into "Dull Surprise".
  Banjo: Oh?
  Kappei: Oh.
  Shinn: Huh.
  Kira: Hm.
  Setsuna: You don't say.
• The English translation of Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: The Moon Dwellers is almost incomprehensible, bordering on Translation Trainwreck. The translation of The Moon Dwellers reads like a first pass done by a native speaker of Japanese who wasn't fluent in English. It's absolutely littered with poor grammar, overly literal wording, remnants of Japanese sentence structure, and almost every other cardinal sin of video game translations. On top of that, the script was censored in an astoundingly incompetent way; evidently the script as originally written used the word "shit" multiple times, but at some point— either for demographics reasons, or just because the translators got cold feet—each instance of the word was replaced with "Damn it" (capitalization theirs). Unfortunately, this was apparently done using Word's find and replace function, because this resulted in lines of dialogue such as "What a Damn itty operator" or "you little Damn it". It must be seen to be believed. This was the first game that Bandai Namco tried to officially translate the series in English, safe to say that since the above V was the next game, they learned their lessons and made sure that future translations avert the trope.
• Games by Taito, on the whole, have been pretty good in this regard. Even when the translation isn't perfect, it's understandable. However, there have been a few howlers.
  • Like the profile for Lick Joe in Violence Fight: "Former professional wrestler. His profession revoked because he killed 13 wrestlers during playing. Although his bodily strength is very strong, his movement is slow." Never mind how they got the idea that "Lick Joe", "Bat Blue", "Lee Chen", "Ron Max", and "Tony Won" were proper names for American underground brawlers. ("Ben Smith" seems passable except that he's supposed to be, y'know, an Indian.)
  • Cadash: "The weapon is not functioning!" No, this doesn't mean your weapon just broke; it's just that an enemy is No Selling it.
  • Pu·Li·Ru·La is full of such phrases as "That town is so head that no persons can live in." Then again, considering how whacked-out the game is in general, it's not surprising that not much of the dialogue makes any logical sense.
• In earlier Tales Series games released in North America, "Armet Helm" is mistranslated as "Ahmet Helm" and "Rebirth Doll" (named as such because it automatically revives the wearer upon defeat) was mistranslated as "Reverse Doll." Both were eventually corrected, the latter slightly later in the series than the former (though, for whatever reason, there are games after that that revert to the "Reverse" name, like Xillia).
  • The official English translation of Tales of Phantasia on the Game Boy Advance translates every single instance of the word "Ragnarok" as "Kangaroo". Why is this the case? According to Clyde "Mato" Mandelin, the infamous "Kangaroo" error is due to using an old copy of MS Word and putting the game's script through spell check. It believed Ragnarok was an error and the first suggestion was Kangaroo, likely due to the two words being almost anagrams, and someone clicked "replace" to remove Ragnarok. Even if the developers did notice, it might've been too close to release to remove the broken script and re-insert the fixed one. Combine this with a change in several translation routines for main character names, and the (correct) removal of the hilarious fan-translation for a certain hot spring scene, and many English-speaking players decry the translation as incredibly inferior to the hacks they had played for years prior.
  • A puzzle in the North American version of Tales of Destiny is Unwinnable with the hints in-game (two of the consonants are wrong).
• Atlus's translation of Tears to Tiara 2 is full of the most obvious mistakes. Special mention goes to:
  • Have Hamil say he won't become Melqart during his pact with Tarte, when everything pointed to him saying he will.
  • Translating gundan, an military formation of 20k to 30k men, as platoon, a group of 15 to 30 men.
  • Turning Izebel's rant at Hasdrubal about the foolishness of people into a rant about the foolishness of Hasdrubal.
• You'd think the sun played an important role in Solatorobo: Red the Hunter based on the title, but no. It's actually supposed to be "soRa (sky, as everyone lives on floating islands) to (and, pronounced "tow") robo (robot(s), obviously)."
• The first Time Crisis rivals Resident Evil in terms of Engrish-ness, even sharing a couple of the same voice actors. E.g.:
  • "We've been invaded. Don't worry, my men will gun him down."
  • "Don't come! It's a trap! OH NO!"
  • "The girl's at the top of that tower! She must be dead by now."
  • "My name is Sherudo. I rule this nation now."
  • "Let's end this once and for all. Just to be sure. Both you and this stinking castle can burn for all I care!"
• Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return had a pretty shaky translation, but one example really stands out. When you get Mizuno to make the Hot Powder or Cold Powder, she tells you that it "boosts damage due to heat or cold". This might cause players to believe that the items are supposed to make the game harder, maybe a built-in Self-Imposed Challenge or something. However, what she actually should have said (and what the items actually do) is that it nullifies damage due to heat or cold — the items make you impervious to fire and ice damage.
  • When you get to the Water Temple, the translation goes from pretty good to pretty terrible. Highlights are "I saw three big holes somewhere. Oh! This cog is the one!", when the "three big holes" he's referring to are right next to the guy he's talking to, and frequently using the wrong pronoun — when being told that a Kokka bird stole one of two identical (fake) eggs that contain reflectors to open the room holding the Water Pig Bag, because it mistook it for one of its own eggs, Zippo says "I mistook it for the real one", rather than "It (the bird) mistook it for the real one".
• The first Touhou Project game, Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers, has things like HARRY UP and TOTLE. 12.8 has the song "Faily Wars". See it here.
  • And all of the Touhou games have bizarre English text on their loading screens: This game is curtain fire shooting game. Girls do their best now and are preparing, please watch warmly until it is ready. followed by a sentence summarizing the game's plot (such as Paradisiac moon was broken!) Curtain fire is a literal translation of danmaku and do their best now is an accurate translation of ganbaru that only fails to allow for how the word is used in practice. These screens are so iconic to the series that they are now Ascended to the point where other games copy them, and "curtain fire" has become a recognizable name for the game genre.
  • 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 THCRAP project, 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), but the incorrect spelling has since been ingrained into everyone's mind so much, that nobody really bothers using the correct spelling.
• True Love Junai Monogatari manages one as part of the Bowdlerization: The Token Mini-Moe says she's in college, while the protagonist thinks that he thought she was in Junior College. This made sense with "high school" which was the relevant level of schooling in the Japanese version, but people are normally the same age when they attend Junior College (more commonly known these days as Community College in the US) as just College, making the distinction unintelligible. (For some reason, he thinks childlike girls go to vocational schools?)
• The English bootleg translation of the arcade version of Wonder Boy in Monster Land has an impressive case of this. Some examples:
  • Gold coins are called "golds" (regardless of number).
  • Status messages include "Body stiffen" and "I'm loose."
  • The name of "Excalibur" is actually spelled out in English in an on-screen graphic. The translators still managed to misspell it in the dialogue as "Axecaliva".
  • The Sega Vintage Collection version, however, uses the more competent translation from the Master System port.
• The marquee on the Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair arcade cabinet calls the hero of the previous games "Book", which is a transliteration of the first half of bukku shonen, the Japanese words for "wonder boy".
• White Gold: War in Paradise sports an exemplary example of this trope. Most of the main plot dialogue translated from Russian to English is somewhat bearable and coherent, but the majority of sidequest dialogue and plain conversation with NPCs in the game seem like they've been run through Babelfish and left at that. Some lines still have Russian words in the middle of the English dialogue.
• The English translations of games from the German studio Daedalic Entertainment tend to suffer from this.
  • In Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, a kite (German: Drachen) was labelled as a dragon (Drache) if you moused over it.
  • Chains of Satinav had the glorious line "It is young Geron from the tannerhood" (der junge Geron aus dem Ledererviertel). ^note Viertel, much like English 'quarter', can be used to mean a district of a city… or a neighborhood… so, a ’hood?
• There are many instances in the Ys series.
  • Falcom's own official romanization for the Fact family is Fukt. Feel free to start laughing any time. Falcom might have turned this into a hint on this family's status as a Big, Screwed-Up Family in Ys: Origin because Cain Fact turned his entire family into demons and pitting his sons against each other.
  • Ys II has a location known as the Solomon Shrine in Hudson Soft's TurboGrafx-16 version, which XSEED Games reworded slightly as Shrine of Solomon in its translation of Falcom's own port to the PlayStation Portable. When Atlus translated Interchannel's Nintendo DS port, which was released between those two, it gave the location the rather fishy name of Palace of Salmon.
  • The same localization as in the item above also shows that Falcom's internal Romanization of "roo" is "loo", but these funny animals are not toilets so most English localizations translate this word into "roo".
  • Falcom's initial English title for Ys: Memories of Celceta was Ys: Foliage Ocean in Celceta, despite the fact that its Japanese title can be neatly translated as Ys: Celceta, the Sea of Trees.
• Fate/Grand Order: In every other piece of Fate media, Saber's true name is translated as "Artoria" (though sometimes it's written "Arturia" instead). It's a feminine version of "Artorius," and is a real, though old and rare, name. To the annoyance of the localization team, who were originally going to use "Artoria", TYPE-MOON mandated that they use "Altria"—which is literally what you get when you put the Japanese version of her name into Google Translate—instead. Made worse by connotations—Altria is the name of the parent company of Philip Morris Tobacco, not exactly the impression you want for a character known for purity and nobility.
• ''ODYSSEE PL'', a two-part German point-and-click adventure game made to promote a band called Primitive Lyrics, has recurring English translations underneath the German text. The games are loaded with stupid deaths, such as a crocodile jumping out of a dark room in the basement and eating you. There are many typos, while some of these translations come off as rather odd.
  Falling down the stairs: "A step that was too big, and slipped! Death lies in wait everywhere!"
  Picking up a key: "This key certainly doesn't have any purpose at all." (The very next thing you do is use it to unlock a door.)
  Inspecting some turntables: "The two turntables of that king jung man who let me in here."
  Correcting the time on a clock: "Yes, let me fix the symbolic dimension, and this soundcheck will be done - At least I hope so."
  Entering the band room (the first line of the second game): "I'm sick of these Instruments. I gotta going on!"
  In a room full of water: "Does this blubbering noise cause mental damage?"
  Looking at a brick wall: "The extreme boring wall insults my eyes."
• Lunar: The Silver Star: Working Designs usually didn't translate their games that poorly (albeit mostly because they tended towards liberal rewrites more than direct localization), but they still made the occasional slip-up. One example from Silver Star accidentally created a new character: at a certain point in the game, an NPC tells Alex that his friend Ramus left for another town "with someone called Fulari", the result of somebody at WD mistaking the phrase フラリ furari (meaning "suddenly" or "without warning" in this context) for a person's name.
• In Puyo Puyo, the Ocean Prince's official English name used to be "Prince of Ocean" before the English translation of Puyo Puyo Tetris corrected this error.
• War Thunder had a bizzare translation describing naval damage control as "the struggle for vitality", which has since been corrected. An awkward phrase that still persists is the description of battle tasks that require a certain number of actions as "not less" than that number rather than "at least", 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 sokuon (which marks a double consonant) as a regular tsu.
• The intro to Wild Riders has one of the playable characters proudly boast "I'm no match for anyone!". Implicitly the voice actor thought it meant the same thing as "no one is a match for me!".
• Elden Ring: The English localization of the scene where Ranni the Witch explains her plan to the Tarnished is poorly translated, making her come across as more callous, cruel, and ambivalent than she does in the original Japanese version.

French Translations

• You being translated as "vous" is a problem in many, many games. While not an error per se, it is an overly polite way of speaking when talking to a single person. It works well when speaking with a high-ranking individual or a stranger, but not so much between two close friends/relatives.
• In general, the word "strafe" (very common in First-Person Shooters) poses a lot of problem to French translators, with many French localizations translating it as "mitrailler" ("shooting [with a machine gun]", as in an airplane's "strafing run") rather than the intended meaning of "walk sideways".
• The French subtitles for Armored Core: For Answer (set in the Armored Core 4 timeline) aren't initially too bad, but the quality of the translation takes a gigantic nosedive around the end of chapter 2, with garbled wording, dropped details, and incoherent, sometimes outright made-up dialogue aplenty. For example, the line "Is he sinking in the ocean? Just like that? Unbelievable." (said in reference to an ally being shot down) is translated as "Underwater mode? You're crazy..." and "It's a missile carnival!" is changed to "It's a Cannibal missile.".
• The mangled French dub of Assassin's Creed II gives us the gem "VOUS LE PAIEREZ DE VOTRE VIE!"^note equivalent line in the English dub is "I'll kill you for what you've done!", an extremely mangled French equivalent of the English idiom "You will pay with your life!"
• In the French version of BioShock, the usable smoking pipe lying next to Jasmine Jolene's corpse is referred as "tuyau", which refers to ''plumbing" pipes. This pipe being a unique power-up, and the other type of pipe being ubiquitous in the game (in the scenery, as a Mook weapon, and as a major component of the hacking minigame) probably contributed to this confusion.
• In the French version of Fire Emblem (aka Sword of Flame): A magic sword using a spell of light ("lumière" in French) was translated as if was itself light ("léger" in French).
• The French version of Clock Tower on the Playstation has many hilarious examples. Some prove that the translators never actually played the game. For example, when you finish an ending, the ending appears on the ending list with a mention that it is "Cleared". They took the wrong meaning and translated it as "Effacer" ("Delete"), which is just confusing.
• In Company of Heroes, the online multiplayer modes for the French version of the game was translated from "2v2 AT" (meaning 2 versus 2, arranged teams) as "2v2 Anti-Tank" (In French).
• The French version of Diablo II translated the Eldritch Orb as "Orbe d'Eltrich", as in "Eldritch's Orb", probably having no idea what 'eldritch' means (although there is a monster named Eldritch the Rectifier). This can still work, as you can translate it as "Orb of Eldritch". While cumbersome, it makes some degree of sense.
• When Disgaea: Hour of Darkness had its DS version released in France, we got a full translation... except that it was the English version almost word for word. Translated with a dictionary, apparently. With pearls like translating "Usagi Drop" as "Rabbit Crap", or failing to see that the Horse Wiener was a Gag Penis and not an actual wiener. Seriously, guys.
• The French translation of Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 has some issues of its own. For example, one mission description mangles "Colony Drop" (i.e. forcibly crashing a space colony down to Earth) into "installing a colony", which will leave those not familliar with the events of the series very confused.
• The French translation of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is fairly decent, but contains a few egregious mistakes. For example, when one of your Dark Brotherhood fellow assassin tells you that Commander Maro was asked to "leave the Brotherhood alone", the French translation is completely litteral and makes it that he was asked to "quit the Brotherhood on his own" instead. A complete headache, given that Commander Maro is a sworn enemy of the Brotherhood and was never part of it to begin with.
• Fallout 2 has quite a good share in the French version:
  • "Peut-être penseras-tu à moi" (Yes, they translated the Shout-Out to the intro of Fallout with "Maybe by Ink Spots".)
  • The Pipe Rifle, which used a pipe as a cannon, was named "fusil à pipe". "Une pipe" is something you use to smoke tobacco, while the pipe used here is "un tuyau". "Pipe" in French is also slang for fellatio, meaning "fusil à pipe" could also mean "blowjob rifle".
  • While it is generally quite good, the French translation of Fallout 3 has its moments:
    • The "Mirelurk Hunter" (a more dangerous version of the Mirelurk type of enemy) was translated as "Hunter of Mirelurk" ("Chassuer de Fangeux") rather than "Mirelurk that hunts" (which would have been "Chasseur Fangeu").
    • The Talon Mercenary Company was translated as... "Compagnie talon" ("Heel company") rather than keeping the "Talon as in claw" meaning.
  • The French translation of Fallout: New Vegas is a complete disaster at times, which is a shame considering the Fallout 3 translation is quite good.
    • "Gypsum Train Yard" (a train yard infested with Deathclaws) is translated as "Cour d'entraînement de Gypsum" (Gypsum's Training Yard).
    • "Climbin' Ev'ry Mountain" (a quest where you investigate some mountains to find a sniper preying on refugees) has been translated as "Grimper la montagne d'Ev'ry", as in, "Climb the mountain of Ev'ry".
    • Some of the weapon mods in the original game are "forged receivers", which increased a gun's health by replacing the receiver with a superior one. The French translation called them "faux récepteurs" ("false receivers", with forged as in "forged documents" instead of "forged metal").
    • The Brush Gun was translated as "Arme de petit calibre" ("Small caliber weapon", it's actually a .45-70 Gov't lever-action rifle, hardly "small caliber").
    • The K9000 cyberdog gun is labelled as a "pistol" instead of the Chainsaw-Grip BFG it is.
    • While the Fiends as a whole have been nicknamed "Tox" (from Toxic) in the dub, generic Fiends are simply called "enemies".
    • Two chems you can use, "Fixer" and "Med-X", are labelled as "Some Fixer." and "Some Med-X." (yes, with the period).
    • Similar to the above, the "Explosives" skill, instead of simply being translated as "Explosifs", is translated as "Des Explosifs." ("Some explosives." again with the unnecessary period).
    • The Light Machine gun and Grenade Machinegun are both referred to as a "mitraillette". The problem is that a "mitraillette" is a sub-machine gun firing pistol rounds and is not a generic term for an automatic weapon (which would literally be "arme automatique") or for a machine gun firing rifle rounds; the word "mitrailleuse" would have been acceptable.
    • During Doc Mitchell's psychological evaluation at the very beginning of the game, "Beam" can be used as an answer to the word "Light", giving the Courier a bonus in Energy Weapons if they pick that choice. Unfortunately, in French, "Beam" can refer to a ray of light or a wooden beam (called a Poutre). The French translation picked the latter, making one of the possible answers look utterly incoherent.
• Final Fantasy VII has its little errors and messes in French, but the one that takes the cake concerns Sephiroth. When arriving for the first time in Nibelheim, Sephiroth tells you that his mother's name was Jenova. In French, he tells you that his mother was Jenova. Cue many players wondering why he went crazy upon learning that Jenova was his mom since he told you about it a few minutes ago.
• The French translation of Halo 2 infamously translated Cortana's line in the ending ("Alright. Shoot.") as "Allez-y, tirer.", "tirer" literally being the verb for shooting (with a weapon) rather than the intended meaning of "OK, tell me what you want to tell me.". The ending being one hell of a cliffhanger, this of course left French fans very confused.
• While the French word for "Werewolf" is "Loup-garou", the French translation of Hexen 2 named Werepanthers as "Panthère-were". No, "were" does not mean anything in French and would be the equivalent of naming them "Garoupanthers" in English.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's French instruction booklet was obviously (badly) translated from English. The best part: they translated "Light Arrows" as "Flèches légères", which means that these arrows are not heavy...
• Penumbra: Overture had a quite good French translation (they even managed to render Red's speech patterns quite accurately), but Black Plague... was not nearly as good. For starters, Red's name was blindly translated as "Rouge" in-game (though amazingly, they got it right in the intro), and then you had a lot of sentences that don't really make sense unless you read the English text they have been translated from, since they followed the original sentences' structure word-for-word, like "Je plaisantais au sujet de la chose 'qui venait le prendre'", which was "I was only joking about the "come, get him" thing" in the original. ^note A more accurate translation would be "Je plaisantais quand je disais "Viens le chercher", because the translated sentence here just means "I was joking about the thing 'that came to take him'".
• Scribblenauts as a whole can easily be wrecked by a bad translation, being a word-centric game, but the French version takes the cake. Pretty much all words give you 2 or 3 possibilities, either all so similar they're impossible to distinguish, or completely unrelated to what you typed. And the disambiguation hints don't help a single bit.
  • Some simple words don't give any results: Try typing “meat" ("viande"), nope, never heard of that.
  • Type "cow" ("vache"), you get "cow (human)", "cow (mammal)" => the first one is a cop; it's apparently old slang nobody's heard of.
  • Type "rock" ("pierre"), you get "rock (stone)", "rock (nature)", “rock (environment)" => the first one is some unidentified U-shaped object, the second one is a big rock, and the third one is a small rock.
  • Type "wall" ("mur"), you get "wall (contruction)" and "wall (construction)".... => The second one is a wall, but the first one is some sort of safety barrier.
  • The list could go on — virtually every word is a problem. Also: type in almost anything in a different language, and go to a different language. The translation is extremely different. (For example, typing "chat" with French, then changing to English and coming back, viewing its name will give you "button front".)
• The French translation of The Sims 2 totally ruined the whole Bella Goth's abduction plot. While they translated her name as "Sonia Gothik" in the first game and in the Goth's family tree in the sequel, they changed Strangetown Bella's name to "Kathy Lalouche". Many French players have no idea that "Sonia" and "Kathy" are supposed to be the same person.
  • The option to tip the Living Statue guy added in Apartment Life has been translated as "donner un conseil" (give a tip, as in, give advice) rather than the correct "donner un pourboire" (give a tip, the money kind).
• The French subtitles of Sonic Adventure 2 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 course collision course with the planet !". And yes, they did repeat "course de collision".
• Star Fox Adventures had an acceptable French translation, but two errors stand out for being visible even if you didn't understand English:
  • Early in the game, after Fox falls into some water, a dinosaur greets him with a line whose two only intelligible words are "hot spring". "spring" was translated as if it was the season.
  • Late in the game, a dinosaur offers to take Fox within striking range of some defensive turrets, but since their range is greater than Fox's, asks him to "protect [me] from their fire" and not blindly shoot at them. It was translated as if the turrets were either equipped with flamethrowers, or on fire themselves.
• An example of a mistranslation that makes sense and is just as funny as the original line: The French dub of the Team Fortress 2 short Meet the Soldier translates the line "Unless it's a farm!" to "Farms don't count!"
• A rather egregious case occurred in the Revelation map of Call of Duty: Zombies. In general, the game's French translations range from acceptable to 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.
• The translation of Trails Of Cold Steel III must to be seen to be believed. The abreviation of the terms employed made the game awkward to understand, the translation is literal to the extreme (one brave order called Sledgehammer is translated into Marteau-Luge^note Which is the translation of the words Hammer and Sledge combined instead of, you know Sledgehammer.), and in at least one occassion the translation utterly spoil one plot point hours before it becomes relevant.^note George's allegiance to the Black Workshop is spoiled in his first character note while the English and Japanese translations had nothing of the sort.
• Total War: Warhammer and its sequels have translation work that is, if not particularly great, generally competent, which makes the mistakes all the more visible.
  • One bit of Flavor Text in the Norscan tech tree mentions how "you plundered the maps, chests and logs" of the Vampire Coast. The only problem? "Logs" was translated as "bûches", that is to say, logs you put in a fireplace (or a kind of cake designed to look like one).
  • 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 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 (as in, the architectural kind), only the final campaign text giving the more accurate "lost sacred chamber".
  • One Wood Elves technology, which allows Treemen units to use the "Flock of Doom" spell (an area-of effect damaging spell described as summoning scores of birds to attack the enemies) once per battle, has the tooltip use an entirely different translation than the one used for the spell (Translating it as "Flight of Destiny" rather than the usual "Infernal Swarm"). It does gives the correct spell, though.
• The back of the box for Nintendogs: Chihuahua & Friends illustrates the voice command feature with a speech bubble saying "Shake!" The Canadian version of the box, which is bilingual, adds the French translation "Secoue-toi!" underneath, which would be a good translation if the "shake" trick made the dog shake its whole body (like if it was drying itself off), but it's actually a handshake; the relevant screenshot even shows the puppy with a raised paw.
• The back of the box for the Nintendo DS version of Band Hero states that you can "wail on the drums." The French version translates this to "lament on the drums."

Spanish Translations

• The Spanish translation of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (the first one released outside Japan) has dozens and dozens of typos, though they're all in Support Conversations, Hector's tale, and in some houses, implying they did some sort of spellchecking, but only the bare minimum. Most stuff got renamed for no apparent reason, most notable being Lyn's promoted class getting Un-Lord-ified from "Blade Lord" into "Swordmistress" (for no reason). But that wasn't the worst. The worst was turning Fae into a boy and claiming Marquess Darin looked... like House Laus.
  • The later installements got better, but they still have issues: Amelia of Sacred Stones refers to herself as a man when she promotes, two throwable weapons from Path of Radiance were called "Swordreaver" and "Axereaver", despite that game having no "Reaver" weapons, and no two games on the same system call (Armor) Knights the same thing (Like most other classes, for that matter... They have it worst though, since half the names are dumb).
• The Spanish mode of Contra: Shattered Soldier translates the "hit rate" indicator on the in-game HUD 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.
• The Curse of Monkey Island makes a mistake of replacing a verb with a subject when Guybrush is on the theatre stage and says "What I really want to do is direct". This should be translated as "Lo que realmente quiero hacer es dirigir". Instead it's translated as "Lo que realmente quiero hacer is directo", which actually sounds like "What I really want to do is straight".
• The Spanish translation of Final Fantasy VII is one of the worst offenders. With legendary errors like "Allevoy".
• The Spanish version of Diablo II had several with the names of the monsters and items:
  • Unraveler — Desenrredador (Untangler)
  • Claw Viper — Garra Viperina (Viper Claw)
  • Overseer — El que todo lo ve (The one that sees everything)
  • Hollow One — Hueco uno (Hole #1, as if we have a hole or hollow labeled "number one")
  • The Necromancer Head items — Translated as "Leader", so you got things like "Leader of the Zombies", "Leader of the Untanglers", and "Leader of the Demons" (Hey, isn't Diablo this one? You've already won the game!)
  • And the infamous Great Poleaxe, translated as "El Gran Pollax", which almost literally means "The big cock". This, combined with the suffixes and prefixes, may lead to things like "The hard big cock", "The relaxing big cock", and such.
  • The Worldstone gets referred to during all of Act V as "Mundo de Piedra", which literally means "Stone World".
  • The Rogues from Act I are referred to as "Arpías" (Harpies).
  • For some reason, all enemies and items introduced in the Lord of Destruction expansion have an article added in their names. For example, Jewels are always called "La Joya" when unidentified, as if there were only one of them in the entire game. This does not happen with the items introduced beforehand.
  • The Latin American Spanish translation of Diablo III is significantly better, but it makes a noticeable mistake by translating Westmarch as "Marca del Oeste", "Westmark".
• Warcraft III has an overall good translation, but there's an error which stands out to anyone who knows English. Kel'Thuzad mentions a piece of knowledge coming from "el demonio Lore". This might seem fine, but then you realize that they didn't translate the word lore, and instead thought it was some demon's name.
  • Similarly, a Stop Poking Me! quote from the Dreadlord involves darkness calling him, and telling him the Demon Hunter gave darkness the Dreadlord's phone number. In the Spanish version, the number was given by "el demonio hunter" — "the Hunter Demon".
  • When it comes to pronounciation, the game never achieves a consistent pronounciation for Archimonde's name — specifically, whether the "e" should be mute or not.
• StarCraft did a very strange translation of unit's lines, most infamously "My life for Aiur" becoming "Mi vida por Auir".
  • There's an error when Kerrigan talks about missile turrets detecting her while cloaked. "Cloaked" was translated as "Disfrazada" ("Disguised") instead of "Camuflada" or "Oculta", as it should have been.
• The Latin American translation of World of Warcraft: Legion is a notable step back from the improved translations provided by Diablo III and StarCraft II. Most notably, there are moments in which characters call each other by their untranslated, English names, for no reason whatsoever (for example, in the Mage Order Hall campaign, there's a line in which Kalec calls Millhouse Manastorm as "Millhouse" instead of "Molino").
• Oddly, while the Latin American translation of Starcraft II Legacy Of The Void is done correctly in terms of dialog, the same cannot be said about subtitles, which are sometimes translated in a different way from what you hear, and sometimes there are lines that are partially or completely cut from the subtitles. It's very noticeable.
• For a strange reason, the Spanish version of Age of Mythology has some lines during the Egyptian campaign where Amanra reffers to herself as male (for example "He sido traicionado" instead of "He sido traicionada") despite the fact that Amanra is clearly female, the character description describes her as female and having a voice actress in the Spanish dub.
• Dungeon Defenders has these on the setup screen for the Spanish version: Save gets translated as "ahorrar", as in "save money with Geico", Launch becomes "Lanzamiento", as in Launching the rocket, Push to talk, and Restore defaults are not even translated. Close gets translated as "Cerca", as in you're too close. Swap remains untranslated once, but then gets translated twice as "canje". Mods gets translated, for some reason, as "conversiones". No idea why. Of course, once in the game, it gets worse... much worse.
• The Spanish version of Escape from Monkey Island has some translation errors so obvious you have to wonder if they didn't use a translating software once in a while. For instance, in the wooden cane store, if you get near the counter, you get a choice to "Ring Bell" to call the manager. The Spanish version translates the word "ring" as the jewelry object instead of the verb, so where it should say "Tocar Campana", it says "Anillo Campana" instead, which makes as much sense as replacing "drink water" with "bracelet water".
• In the Spanish version of FIFA 09, they translated Belgian Club RC Standard de Liège as "RC Normal de Liège". One might think "well, maybe they didn't get the license for that club", but yes, they did. It even has the official club crest and logos.
• The So Bad, It's Good Spanish ROM hack Pokémon Quartz has plenty of these. The creator claims he made it partly to practice his English. He needed the practice.
  "Argh! Fucking kid! You send my plan down to the WC!" ^note WC is short for "water closet", an old-fashioned but technically correct euphemism for the toilet.
  • The creator seems to use "paranoia" for both "supernatural" and "coincidence", neither of which is what paranoia actually means (unfounded suspicion). Several NPCs address the player character by Spanish nicknames, which are never explained as such, making you wonder who they're addressing. Misspellings abound. And then there's the Gratuitous Japanese, which manages to be even worse than his English.
• For that matter, the "standard" translation for the Pokémon games is an example too.
  • "Play Rough" is translated as "Carantoña" (caress or flattery).
  • "Close Combat" is translated as "A Bocajarro" (point blank).
  • Bullet Seed becomes "Recurrente" (recurrent).
  • "Poison Heal" is translated as "Antidoto" (antidote). This would be a valid translation for an item that cures poison, but it's the name of an ability that inverts poison damage into healing.
  • "Healer" is translated as "Alma Cura" (Heal Soul?).
  • "Moxie" is translated as "autoestima" (self-esteem).
  • In Pokémon X and Y, some translation mistakes were corrected. For instance, Counter's translation was changed from "Contador" — "Someone who counts" — to "Contraataque" (Exactly What It Says on the Tin), while Slam's translation was changed from "Portazo" — a literal door slam — to "Atizar" and Return's translation was changed from "Retroceso" — literally, "go back to a former point in space" — to "Retribución".
  • When we talk about "Audaz" in the Spanish Pokémon games, what are we talking about? The Ability (Reckless)? Or the Nature (Brave)? Bonus points for neither translation being correct — Audaz is closer to being a translation for the Bold nature than those two.
• Resident Evil 4 had quite a few mistakes in Spanish, which is bizarre since the game takes place in an indeterminate region of Spain, and the enemy names and taunts are in Spanish by default in every version of the script. An enemy that turns invisible is called "Novistador", which is supposed to be "the Unseen". However, translated to English, it means something akin to "No Sight Man". There's also one of the phrases the Ganados scream at Leon when they're following him is "¡Puedes correr, pero no puedes discutir!". They obviously meant it to be Spanish for "You Can Run, but You Can't Hide"; however, "discutir" means "discuss" or "argue", not "hide", which makes the threat puzzling rather than intimidating.
  • Two monsters in particular have names that were translated into Spanish in a way that makes no sense. One is the Garrador, presumably translated literally from the English "clawer" ("claw" as a verb, with the suffix "-er" making it "one who claws". However, the Spanish word for claw, "garra", is not a verb, so the direct translation makes no sense for a Spanish speaker. The Novistador mentioned earlier is even worse, as it probably comes from literally translating the English words, "no", "sight" and the "-er" suffix, i.e. "nosighter", which doesn't really make sense in either language.
• In the Spanish instructions of Sonic games, Sonic was often referred to as Sónico, adding the male suffix, and made liberal use of the verbs "Salvar"^note which gets a pass for becoming an anglicism, although more proper "Guardar" and "Grabar" were already there and "Remover" (as in, to "rescue" and "remove" your save file).
• The Warhammer 40,000 game Space Hulk's translation from English to Spanish had a few of these, including "si fire no move" (unknown original line, but presumably "If you fire, you can't move") and "Giro 19, izquierda 1" (turn 19, left 1; "izquierda" is left as in left and right).
• Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders had an absolutely pitiful Spanish translation. Several words like "hat", "guitar", or "peanuts" were left untranslated. Some other parts were translated very poorly; for example, "duct tape" became "tapa tubo" (tube lid) and "What a line!" became "Que trola!" (What a bitch!). On top of that, this version sometimes displays several messages at the same time, rendering the text unreadable, and has the foreign airports graphically glitched.
• On when a bad translation can actually have an impact in gameplay: the Autopsy Report in the final case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations makes a critical omission on where the victim was stabbed. This means that, in one of Dahlia's testimonies, the player has no idea they have to object in the statement that says the victim was stabbed while leaning on a rock, because she was stabbed from the back (which the autopsy report fails to mention). If, by complete chance or by using a guide, the player presents the Autopsy Report to that statement, Phoenix explains that the Autopsy Report mentions that the victim was stabbed from the back... which is completely false in this translation.
• In the Spanish translations of Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Pyribbit's name is Pirobúho, which could be translated back as Pyro Owl; this surely was caused by a confusion, as the species of this boss isn't pretty evident at first glance, but it gets odd when this alleged owl just keeps hopping around and attacking with its tongue like the toad it really is. This same name is still used in future Kirby games where it makes an appearance, such as the Team Kirby Clash series.
• Normally, the Latin American Spanish translations of Kirby games use the "EX" suffix for the harder bosses, like in Japanese, Chinese, English, French, Korean and Portuguese. However, upon finishing the Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe demo version for the first time, the notification concerning Whispy Woods EX mistakenly uses the "+" suffix normally only used in Castilian Spanish and Dutch. The full version of the game also mistakenly refers to Dark Meta Knight by his English name for one of the Dress-Up Masks in the Latin American Spanish version instead of "Meta Knight oscuro," a trait usually only seen in the Castilian version.
• Terraria: While not as bad as before 1.3.5 (see the Translation Train Wreck page), the Spanish translation still has some problems. Among the most egregious examples are: "Star Wrath" as "Espectro estelar" (Star Wraith), "Bloody Tear" as "Osito sangriento" (Bloody Bear), "Stellar Tune" as "Atún estelar" (Stellar Tuna), "Cool Whip" as "Látigo molón" (translating "cool" as "awesome" instead of "cold"), "Jungle Torch" as "Antorcha de fuego" (Fire Torch).
• Paper Mario: The Origami King: The game's Spanish translations are pretty good, either improving jokes from the English version or adding in new ones. However, there are two notable errors:
  • First is a line from the Toad in the sound gallery of the museum: in English, he says "Shh... Just close your eyes and listen. A bup bup bup! No talking..." The Spanish version changed this to "Shhh... Cierra los ojos y escucha. Es como un "bip, bup, bop"... No digas nada." While the first part is accurate, they seem to have interpreted "bup bup bup" as a description of the music rather than an interjection (representing the sounds Toads make), translating to "It's like a 'bip, bup, bop'..."
  • One of the Toads in Scorching Sandpaper Desert greets Mario with, "Mario! Charmed, I'm sure." In Spanish, this is instead translated as "¡Mario! ¿Alguna vez te han dicho que eres encantador?" ("Mario! Have you ever been told that you are charming?")
• The Spanish translation of the first Digimon World game, being of a time where Spanish translations of videogames were few and far between, has errors ranging from using the wrong translation of a word (at one point, a Drimogemon says "Shoot!", as in the interjection, but it's translated as "¡Disparad!", as in the verb), to inconsistent translations of the same term (the Drill Tunnel is called "Taladrar Túnel", as in the verb, in the entrance, while it's correctly called "Túnel Taladro" while inside), to bizarre errors where the possessive case "'s" is translated as the contraction of the verb to be (so a phrase like "Palmon's Meat fell" gets mangled into something like "Palmon is fallen Meat"), to omitting punctuation and making a phrase sound completely different (e.g. "[Player]: It's [OBJECT NAME]!" is translated as "[Player] is [OBJECT NAME]").
• In the first DiRT Rally game, the Hard Tyres were localized as "Ruedas Difíciles", which means "Hard Tyres"... but in terms of difficulty, not on how hard the substance is. The correct translation would have been "Ruedas Duras".
• Forza Motorsport (2023) lets you choose whether to make a race have a the start be Rolling or Standing. The latter, however, was localized in Spanish as "De pie", as in on foot, rather than "En parado". It led to players joking that they actually meant that the drivers started on foot to reach their cars as in how it used to be in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Portuguese Translations

• Bloodborne had the Chapel Dweller's "The screams of wimminfolk" line translated as "Os gritos do povo wimmin", which means literally "The screams of the "Wimmin people" — as if it's the name of a community or tribe.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 allows you to play as a member of the Brazilian Militia (actually a criminal gang) in multiplayer. When the character is about to plant a claymore, he yells: "Golpeando com espada!" (Striking with a sword!), presumably because the translators confused the claymore mine with the Claymore sword. When the character is about to reload, he yells: "Trocando de arma!" (Changing weapon!). When the character is about to throw a flashbang, he yells: "Apareceu de repente!" (Appeared all of a sudden!) or "Atirando uma granada de mão!" (Throwing a hand grenade!). However, when he throws a fragmentation grenade, he says: "Atirando uma granada de luz!" (Throwing a flash grenade or flashbang).
• The Brazilian translation for Dark Souls II does a good job of fitting the medieval mood most of the time, but there are still some spelling errors and oddities such as the Throne of Want area being renamed "Sanctuary of Want". At one point, the scholar Aldia calls the protagonist a "hollow teen" despite it being correctly translated as "young hollow" every other time. It also badly translates his last line in the game, should the player choose to leave the Throne: "And yet, we seek (another option), insatiably… Such is our fate" turns into "Just like our fate".
• Don't Starve has a bizarre example in the singleplayer version, since the translation is bad because it's got very few, if any errors. The character Wolfgang is written as a dim-witted strong man from an indeterminate european country with the accent to match, a trait that is almost abscent in the portuguese translation, as most of his speech quirks (such as omitting first-person pronouns when speaking) are seen as normal in portuguese. Don't Starve Together would feature a more accurately broken translation for him.
  • That is not to say that his speech is perfect, though. His quote for eating enought over a hundred hunger points ("Wolfgang is better") becomes "Wolfgang é melhor", or "Wolfgang [has always been] better", due to a very literal translation of the word "is".
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe: The music track "Another Domination" was mistakenly translated as "Dimensão paralela" (Another Dimension) in Portuguese, which ended up sharing a name with the other music track also named "Another Dimension."
• The Brazilian Portuguese translation of Mortal Kombat 9 (one of the first in the new wave of Brazilian game releases) has a few blunders. In Story Mode, when Sonya rescues Jax from Shang Tsung's captivity, she asks how he's doing and he replies with "I'm great". Okay, but Portuguese isn't gender-neutral on adjectives, so the translation is given on feminine form! (the caption reads "Estou ótima"). And Sonya's reply ("Liar" - because Jax's all beat up) follows suit! ("Mentirosa"). Also, the Tower mission where Scorpion has to beat up Mileena because she made him a teddy bear. It's pretty clear she has a teddy bear in her hand, but "teddy" can mean both the bear and a sort of women’s underwear. Guess which meaning the translators went with?
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 is one of the biggest offenders. The Portuguese translation of this game is filled with grammatical errors and sentences that don't make sense. Basically, a literal translation done by a group with little to no knowledge in the Portuguese language. The next game, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Revolution, improved a bit on the Portuguese translation, but still has a lot of errors.
• Not only does the Portuguese in Scribblenauts look like a mix of Portugal and Brazil Portuguese, they also managed to do this in the pause menu: The restart option became "Tente Sair" (Try to Quit).

German Translations

• The "instructions" for the cheaper Commodore 64 games on tape often consisted of nothing more than "Type LOAD and press Return key". In one instance, this got translated into German thus: "Type LADUNG und presse zurück Schlüssel," which contains exactly one correct word.
  Type: Not translated. What?
  LADUNG: They translated the computer command, thus making sure that the instructions can't work at all.
  presse: Wrong meaning of "press".
  zurück: No. The key has the word "Return" written right on it — so don't translate it!
  Schlüssel: Wrong meaning of "key".
• Call of Duty: United Offensive has all your team messages in German if you're on the German team. Said messages are all translated and pronounced correctly. Unfortunately, in CTF, the messages for "we have the enemy flag" and "the enemy has our flag" are reversed. The (English) text still displays correctly, but the conflicting audio makes life rather more confusing than it needs to be if you happen to speak German.
• The German version of Civilization IV translates "Power" in the statistics screen as "Elektrizität" (electricity). It's about military power.
• There are some potentially out-of-place uses of the word 'Panzer' in Codename: Panzers. Anything that is called a tank is called a Panzer in-game — Russian crewmen shout that their Panzer has broken down, while a US unit cries "A Tiger... they have a Tiger Panzer!" Obviously, due to the use of Panzer (short for Panzerkampfwagen, "armour-battle-vehicle") meaning both tank in German, and being the designation for their AFVs in WW2 (at least until the Panther, which was officially designated the Panzerkampfwagen V until Adolf Hitler himself decreed in 1944 that it shouldn't be).
• The German translation of Grandia 2 for the Grandia HD Collection translates the "MISS" text for when you miss an attack as "FRÄULEIN", which does indeed mean "miss"... "Miss" as in the form of address for an umarried woman.
• The German version of Dawn of War Soulstorm has the soritas screaming "Hexenkraft und Ketzerei", which comes from "witchcraft and heresy", which should have been "Hexerei und Ketzerei".
• The German version of Dungeon Defenders had "Exit" translated as "Ausfahrt", which indeed means exit... but of an Autobahn. "Save" and "Close" are translated in exactly the same sense (and thus exactly as wrong) as in the Spanish game.
• The German translation of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is definitely one of the worst commercial English-to-German translations in the last decade. The "Quit" button in the main menu is labeled "Fertig", which means "done" in English. Numerous quest texts aren't even translated at all, the part of the main quest in Kvatch, for example. Some items have horribly crippled names like Schw.Tr.d.Le.En.W, which stands for "Schwacher Trank der Lebensenergie-Wiederherstellung" (Weak Potion of Restoring Life Energy). It was so pathetically bad that Bethesda had to create a separate German patch just to fix the worst of the horrible translation and make the item names comprehensible. Most of the other issues haven't been fixed to this day.
• Any time Tohsaka Rin speaks German in Fate/stay night. It sounds cool and all, but it reads like the writers wrote it by translating literally using first a Japanese-to-English dictionary and then an English-to-German one. An example from Heaven's Feel (when she's putting a geis on Shirou to make him obey her):
  Satz. (Sentence, as in the grammatical kind)
  Beklagter, meine Wörter, werden geglaubt. (Mourned/lamented, my words, are believed)
  Weiß ist schwarz. (White is black - this is the only part that makes any kind of sense)
  Richtige übliche Peitsche. (Right usual whip. ...What?)
  Die Vergeltung vom Himmel. (Probably meant to be "Vengeance from the heavens", but actually reads "The avenge from heaven/sky")
• Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist in German is a huge mess. One specific example, for example, is that "jockstrap" was translated as "Scotsman's suspender".
• Beijing ELEX Co. Ltd.'s Web Games usually suffer from this, especially the German translations. Happy Harvest is particularly infamous for this, especially in its original release, parts of which were hardly decipherable. Translations have improved in newer versions, but still contain mistakes like both components of "horseman" being translated individually ("Pferdemann"), invoking images of a centaur (or a Funny Animal) rather than an equestrian. Their other games fare no better; Cafe Time for instance, besides strange grammar and parts being left entirely untranslated, renders "counter" (the piece of furniture) as someone who counts, and "serve" (as in serving food) in the sense of serving a customer, implying that you would need to bring food to your food. The German translation of Happy Harvest was apparently translated from English after being translated from Mandarin Chinese, sometimes downright bordering on Translation Trainwreck as a result.
• The German translation of Hidden & Dangerous is a hilarious example. The sentences seemed correct at first, mostly as it featured voice-overs, but almost all critical information was wrong. In one mission, the player is ordered to destroy "die verbleibenden Panzer" (the remaining tanks), but there are no tanks on the map! Unless, of course, you figure out that tank can also mean an oil tank. Another example is "Bordwaffenbeschussmodus links / rechts" (aircraft weapon firing mode left / right) meaning, yes, "strafe left / right". There is some historical truth to it, but it made it look like your HQ was infiltrated by Dadaists. At least you're introduced to the translation quality from the very beginning - the game's loading screen reads "Das Laden, warten bitte". In English, "The Loading, wait please".
• Nexus: The Jupiter Incident was quite obviously translated into german by someone less than fluent in the language. Among other things, "Fighters" (as in, jet fighter) became "Kämpfer" ("Fighting people") instead of "Jäger" (which translates to "Hunters", but is the german term for that kind of craft). Also, every single instance of sarcasm is translated and pronounced like it is meant to be utterly sincere, which makes the narrator seem a tad unhinged at times.
• The translation for Persona 5 Royal was already pretty hit or miss, albeit more to due to being littered with awkward line breaks and text formatting errors than actual translation mistakes. One notable instance where something was mistranslated though was the name of Raoul's unique skill. It's called "Phantom Show" but got translated as Phantomschnee, which means "Phantom Snow".
• At one point in Portal, GLaDOS says "weeee" as in the exclamation, not the pronoun. The German translation turned it into "wiiiiir", which is the German word for the pronoun "we".
• The German translation of The Sims 2 had a few examples of being too literal in translating - when clicking on a full training potty, the game tells you 'Leer' as in it is empty rather than to empty it, which would be 'Leeren'.
• In Space Colony, among the player's many tasks is mining for silicon (in German: "Silizium") to produce computer chips. German players, however, had to mine "Silikon" (silicone). Admittedly a very deceptive false friend, but come on...
• The German demo (and possibly the retail version) of 1998's Spec Ops: Rangers Lead The Way had a hilariously bablefish-translated readme file attached. The highlights: (U.S. Army) Rangers turn into (Forest) Rangers, i.e. men who work in the woods taking care of trees and animal populations etc. (Förster). Navy SEALs turn into literal seals i.e. something that locks a door or similar for good (Versiegelung). Then there's the multitude of different first-generation 3D accelerator chip brands that are translated literally: Stingray 3D (Stachelrochen 3D), Orchid Righteous (Rechtschaffende Orchidee)...
• Terraria has multiple languages as of version 1.2. However, at least in the German language, the word "close" as in "close a window" has been translated as "close by". Furthermore, the word "save" as in "save the game" has been translated to mean "save" as in "save money".
• Tales of Symphonia had a very basic, but horrible translation mistake during the scene of Sheena attempting to make a contract with Water Spirit Undine, but she can't because Undine is still bound to a contract with a summoner called 'Mithos'. The line in question has Sheena say that they 'don't even known where this Mithos guy is' and is what the English dub says. The German translation translated Where as Wer, which in German means Who. The correct word would be Wo. It's a very simple mistake that a lot of people make at first, because the English and German words for where/wo and who/wer are pronounced similarly.

Italian Translations

• Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 is translated using the least common meaning for most words divorced from context entirely, translates English idioms poorly, and overall is a borderline example of Translation Trainwreck . Notable errors include translating "brawn" as "patè di maiale" (that is, "pork mousse", also known as headcheese to Americans) instead of "muscoli" ("muscles") and "softy" as "testa di turco" (in other words, a pudding) instead of the more logical "tenero" or other such words, and translating "easy on the eyes, but don't turn your back to her" into something that implies decidely un-PG and somewhat offensive actions. The amateur-level voice acting doesn't help the translation's case.
• The Italian translation of King's Field IV is notorious in the Italian video game community for its translation, which is considered to be So Bad, It's Good by many.. The translators clearly didn't have a single clue about Italian language and made everything up with a translator engine: for example, "Equipment" became "Equipaggio", that means "Crew", and you can find weapons like the "Spada che Uccide" ("The Sword that Kills") and the "Club Legno" ("Wooden Club", where "Wooden" was translated and "Club" was not. Furthermore in Italian the word "club" is used, like in English, to indicate groups of people with a common interest, or the buildings in which meetings of these groups take place. The Italian word for "club", as in "heavy stick", would be "mazza", "clava"), and in addition to that they probably had to cope with memory segments for texts and the fixed length of FMVs: the results are that some words were abbreviated or changed to something else with less characters (the infamous "H20" instead of "water", "acqua" in Italian). And then, there is the incredible intro FMV, where the voice actor doesn't even try to pretend to be Italian and everything is randomly sped up to match the FMV's length.
• Salt and Sanctuary has also been clearly translated with an automatic translator without proofreading to see if the translation actually made sense. The best example of this is "Strike Defense" translated to "Difesa Sciopero": "Sciopero" is the Italian translation of "Strike", as in "to refuse to continue working because of an argument with an employer about working conditions, pay levels, or job losses".
• The original Grand Theft Auto's Italian translation seems to be fine for the most part, but it has at least one mistake. One of the missions in the first scenario begins with the text, "Bubby's wife, Skye, has been visitin' a friend in Central Estoria. Go get her." The Italian translator translated the last three words as "Vai a farla fuori." The problem is, "farla fuori" means "get her" as in "kill her" — whereas the intended meaning was simply "pick her up". In other messages, the game makes it clear in both languages that killing Skye is supposed to be a bad thing.
• The Italian translation of Shogo: Mobile Armor Division translates "intelligence", as in "military intelligence", as "intelligenza", which means "intelligence" as in "intelligence quotient".
• In the Italian translation of the videogame adaptation of The Emperor's New Groove, "lethal drops" has been translated as "gocce letali". "Gocce" actually means "liquid drops": a more fitting translation would have been "dirupi".
• The Italian version of the adventure game Cruise for a Corpse. Delphine Software (which was a French company) didn't hire professional translators and handled translation by itself, with the result being nearly incomprehensible as a result. One example is found in the game's title itself, which has been translated as Crociata per un cadavere (which would actually translate to "Crusade searching for a corpse").
• Every game made by WayForward Technologies is infamously translated in Italian with an automatic translator, creating all sort of errors and flubs. A major offender is found in the menus for River City Girls, which has gems such as "friendly fire" translated as "arma da fuoco" ("firearm") or "resume" translated as "curriculum vitae". Another case is found in Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, where Uncle Mimic's exclamation of "Blast it all!" is translated literally as "Make everything explode!"
• The Italian instructions for the original Sonic the Hedgehog called the main character "the Sonic" all the time.
• In Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, the Italian translation mistranslates "carbon" as "carbone" (coal) instead of "carbonio".
• The Italian version of Zoocube translated the word "ostrich" as "ostrica". "Ostrica" is Italian for "oyster", a correct translation would be "struzzo".
• The back cover◊ for Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days is legendary among fans: the original blurbs were lifted from the English version and very clearly fed to an automatic translator and sent to the graphic department without even bothering with a quick proofreading. The final result is a mess of malapropisms-filled word salads, where almost every verb is in the infinitive form instead of being properly conjugated. A few gems from this surrealist masterpiece: "To make the crazy damages!"; "To make the enemies jump like never before!", which would be almost fine if not for the fact that the original text said "Blow away enemies like never before!"; "Magichange to make the hell collaborations!"; "The hard game returns!" in particular is made snicker-worthy by the fact that in Italian the word "hard" is often used as short for "hardcore pornography". And sadly you can't even say that at least they didn't screw up the spelling, since they managed to misspell the word "fonzioni" (it should be "funzioni", which means "features"). Twice. What's more, the game itself wasn't translated into Italian (the small British flag in the corner is to indicate that the game is only in English), as it was pretty common with text heavy games for the PSP. Given how Disgaea is a very text heavy game that requires a certain fluency in English, one wonders why they bothered with a translation of the back cover at all.
• In the Italian localization of Mystery Detective 2 (or Touch Detective 2½, if you're American), a few times the dialogue devolves into complete gibberish that was very clearly machine-translated from English, especially in the second half of the game. Also, they even kept the "back" command in one of the menus in Japanese◊.
• The Italian translation of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney translated every instance of *sniff* as "*fiutata*". As an onomatopoeic word, it shouldn't be translated, but they did it anyway. The issue was fixed in the sequels.
• The Italian translation of The Last of Us is mostly well done, but one line has an infamous translation error: when interacting with a chessboard, Ellie asks Joel "la sai suonare?". This is a blatant mistranslation of her original line, which stated "can you play it?": the Italian translation probably thought Ellie was referring to a guitar, since "suonare" means "play" as in "play an instrument". The remake initially kept in the translation error, but in a patch released in April 2023 the error was fixed by replacing both Ellie's question and Joel's answer with lines taken from other interactions, creating a new exchange that, while not accurate to the original version, makes sense in the context of the scene.

Japanese Translations

• An iPhone game, Anime Jigsaw Puzzle's Japanese version has gems such as "Tap to select hot anime" becoming "tap for select hot anime", with "hot" meaning "high temperature".
• The Japanese version of Call of Duty: Black Ops II has a score of translation errors, as noted by Kotaku right here.
• Gundhara already have spelling and grammatical errors in it's opening credits. "The goverment opened emergency meeting, and chose two soldiers. Then they started fighting.◊" indeed...
• The official Japanese translation of later Modern Warfare games has plenty of problems - most infamously in the level "No Russian", the Title Drop of "Remember, no Russian" was translated to mean "Kill them, they're Russian"—not entirely inappropriate to the result of the mission, mind you, but entirely different from the intended meaning (one character warning his squadmates not to speak in Russian so as to appear as American terrorists). And, of course, the character who says this is Russian.
• The Japanese version of PETA's Flash game New Super Chick Sisters translates Bowser as バウザー (Bauzā). This is absolutely an acceptable translation and is used in several places in Japanese works, but it is never used in direct reference to the character, who is always クッパ (Kuppa). It also obscures a quote from Super Mario RPG by translating the exclamation in "Fungah! Foiled again!" as フンガー (Fungā) instead of フンギャ (Fungya) and translating the second half of the line, which was added in localization and didn't exist in the Japanese version.
• Microsoft's 1994 advertising slogan "Where do you want to go today?" was reported as being the victim of an unfortunate translation error; it is easy enough to translate, but the translator felt the need to indicate that it was an implied offer of help rather than merely a question, and translated it as: "If you don't know where you're going we'll make sure you get taken there."
• The Japanese dub of Fallout 4 has a number of significant translation problems. One of the most frequently heard, and funniest, is the raiders' "Hell yeah!" voice clip, which was directly translated as "地獄だ、やぁ！" (literally "Hell! Yeah!", though it could also be interpreted as "Wow, this is hell!" or "What's up? This is hell!").
• Gaia Crusaders have some rather terrible translation in it's opening prologue and epilogue, which detracts from an otherwise kick-ass Beat 'em Up game. You know you're in for a trainwreck when the opening lines read: "20XX, Peaceful Earth conquered by Evil Satan, Heir of Lost Kingdom, all Nature Evilized by Dark Power... Wars Start Everywhere and the World is at the Edge of Destruction..."
• Atari's arcade games were infamous in Japan for their bad localizations, to the point of Memetic Mutation. One example is the 1989 racing S.T.U.N. Runner, which translated the phrase "insert a coin" into コインいっこいれる (koin ikkō ireru), which is a plain verb rather than a request or command. Most Japanese arcade games at the time wrote the phrase in English anyway, making the poor translation completely unnecessary.
• A troubling example in the case of Celeste. The game's story thoughtfully follows the main character learning to cope with their depression and other mental issues, but the original Japanese translation constantly used the offensive slur of "気ちがい" (Kichigai) throughout the entire game, which essentially had the effect of every character calling themselves and each other "retards". The developer got a new localization team to fix the issue as soon as they were alerted to the problem.
• In the Japanese localization of Stray, Doc's safe in the library is referred to as "安全" (anzen) in Jess's note. "安全" means "safe", as in "secure", and not a "safe", as in a "vault". The correct term, "金庫" (kinko), is used for the prompt to interact with the safe (金庫を使用).

Russian Translations

• There was a particularly bizarre (and hilarious) Russian translation of Empire Earth II. "Composite bowmen" apparently equals "complicated men of bowing". A Korean faction named "Chou" ? "A tube made out of paste" (presumably connected to Choux pastry?).
• In one of the Russian localizations of the first Half-Life game, the chapter name "We've got hostiles" was translated as "We've got hostels".
• A Russian translation of Halo: Combat Evolved left all of the voice-overs alone, but replaced all the text. It seems that it was done by either a computer, or someone who has no idea what they are doing. The first mission's objective of "Find Captain Keyes" became "Find the Captain's keys".
• A pirate Russian translation of Heroes of Might and Magic IV had one distinctive mistake in it: All of the the buttons labeled "Back", instead of being translated as in "Go Back" ("nazad") were translated like the part of the body ("spina").
  • Also, one pirate Russian translation of Heroes of Might and Magic V: Hammer's of Fate was made with autotranslator, which led to some hilarious phrases, for example, original phrase "Give us the child and surrender" became "Daite nam rebenka i sdachu", which means "Give us the child and a change". That is, like the bought a child in a shop. The strange thing is that the game was made by a Russian developer.
• The Russian version of Mass Effect 2, full stop. There is everything: mistranslations, text that wasn't in the original, missed text from the original, they screwed up even the font. Plus, half the names from the translation of the original (done by entirely different company) was carried over, while the other half wasn't. The Russian version of Mass Effect 3 was a bit better, but not much.
  • Even worse with the most recent Citadel DLC. You might think they used voice files to make their translation, because this is the only way one can confuse "odd Earth custom or..." with "odd Earth customer ". And again they didn't bother to carry over names from the translation of Mass Effect 2.
• Russian version of Max Payne had horrible voice actors, poor font decisions, some translation mistakes. Plus, the voice actors talked so slow that a lot of text that was in the comic cutscenes was cut away. The Russian version of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne was not much better, either. Some of the scenes are poorly edited, sometimes leaving out the English voices.
• In the original Sims' Makin' Magic, you can have a cat-sized pet dragon which you can, among other things, pet and groom (as in clean with a brush). A Russian version of the game used the wrong meaning of 'groom', and translated it to mean "the guy who marries the bride".
• The Overmind from Starcraft was blatantly translated in Russian as "Nadmozg" ("Abovebrain"). Later, it was adapted as a nickname for a poor translator (usually of movies or video games). Also, "Terran" was assumed to be a name, so every Terran unit's name was something like "Terran's Siege Tank".
• The outro of the Human campaign of Warcraft III Reign of Chaos. Arthas announces that: "this kingdom will fall, and from its ashes a new order will rise that will shake the very foundation of the world". Apparently, the idiot who translated it into Russian managed to confuse "shake" with "shape", as Arthas says "...wil become the foundation of the world".
• Oh, the Russian version of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. There are only few sentences that aren't broken. For example, "Kadzihurra Miller", "Press The Button Of Start", or "You peeking witch!". Or these brilliant sentences, such as "Huey makes a big damage to Huge Boss's people, and his influence made a quicker arms race at the Mom's Base", "Snake, you're going on a coward objective", or "Snake and his partner were running a small shop with military goods" from the Peace Walker backstory. Though the translation was apparently made by a Russian woman who didn't know anything about Metal Gear, the way it reads you'd think she didn't know any Russian either. The translation was patched soon enough, but it still has some hiccups.
• While mostly averted in the Russian version of Empire: Total War, which seems to have been translated by professionals, there is one glaring mistake. The Carolinas territory in North America is translated as Caroline Islands (an archipelago in the Pacific), which can confuse some people, since they're not islands. True, both the Carolina states and the Caroline islands are frequently referred to as "Carolinas", but the difference should be plainly obvious.
• There are plenty of examples in Bethesda's games:
  • One of the better known examples from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the "Waking Nightmare" quest was misread by translators as "Walking Nightmare".
  • Fallout: New Vegas is full of various translation errors, but the most infamous ones are related to misinterpretations of references in quest titles. Some examples include the "I Put A Spell on You" quest being translated as "Spymania", and the "Return to Sender" quest as "Boomerang".
• Devolver Digital's games have questionable Russian localization in general, but Hotline Miami and its sequel are definitely the most infamous ones.
  • A classic example in the original is Biker's scooter getting called a "bicycle". Another good one is when you first meet the Hooker – she says something that can be translated back as "Just cum me out...".
  • The second game has no outright idiotic mistranslations but it did spawn a few memes since translators forgot to take the difference of Russian and English speech styles into account. Due to this, characters often say something that's translated correctly but is structured in an awkward way. The best example is Jake saying "Ya chlen..." what can be interpreted as "I am penis...", instead of intended "member". Sentences with adjective "fucking" are even more blatant examples of "runglish". Instead of coming up with a better swear collocation or plainly translating it as "jobanij" translators decided to just use the word "blya" surrounded with commas, every time. It's funnier in context. Especially Jake's first call, and Tony's comment on the party.

Polish Translations

• It should be noted that a good deal of games that let you customize your character or just choose between different characters with different genders will often end up running the game's Polish translator in a corner. Like most other Slavic languages, verb forms in the past tense or the subjunctive mood will differ depending on whether the speaker or the addressee is male or female. While sometimes it is possible to come up with an algorithm that will change the version of a sentence to be uttered taking into account those factors, whenever the game is actually provided with full voice acting, it becomes almost an impossibility. In these cases it's easier to just try your best to think of as gender-neutral a word choice as can be.
  • Aside from that, Polish, much like most other non-English languages, has to suffer because of the necessity to differentiate between the singular and plural "you", which tends to become an impossible to overcome obstacle whenever, for instance, you encounter an NPC that will always address you the same way regardless of whether you have any companions with you at the moment. To make matters worse, Polish, unlike most other Slavic languages, can't resort to just using the polite (plural) form on everyone due to it being outdated and also having a Communistic vibe to it.
  • Older gamers may also add a general note that is not related to any specific game: during the heyday of computer piracy, black market often provided the games it sold with bootleg translations by people who plainly didn't care for anything beyond exact word-for-word translation, or just didn't speak Polish as a first language (judging by details such as word structures typical of East Slavic languages that tended to appear in in-game texts).
• The Polish version of Beyond Good & Evil features the English voice track, and apparently translates the English idioms used in the game very... er, literally. "This button has no fruit juice."
• The otherwise acceptable translation of Fallout 3 contains a really bad pun, changing the name of villain AntAgonizer into what can be most closely re-translated as "Entomology McAnt" (although translating the nickname "Three Dog" literally is a close second). Curiously, most failed translations come from one and the same distributor. Of course, "AntAgonizer" is already a terrible pun to begin with, so... "Lincoln's Repeater" was translated as "Lincoln's Semi-Automatic Rifle". If you know at least a bit about guns you'll rage.
  • The Point Lookout DLC fares no better. The location "Lil' Tyke Playhouse" is named as if "Tyke" was the name of a specific character, while the "Backwater Rifle" weapon is translated as "A rifle from Backwater" as if, again, Backwater was a specific location.
• The Polish translation of Jagged Alliance 2, while being mediocre overall, contains some really idiotic translations, like the phrase "I could use a hand here" being translated literally (hand as body part, not "help") and Wolf's quote "Stay alert, they'll probably pop out the moment we drop our guard" being turned into "Stay alert, they'll probably jump out when we take out the guards" in the subtitles (only text was translated, as opposed to the expansion pack...).
• The Polish version of The Return of the King videogame translated the dialogue between Éowyn and the Witch-King this way:

  Witch-King: Pathetic female warrior.
  Éowyn: I will kill you if you touch him.
  Witch-King: Kill me? Fool. No living being can slay me.
  Éowyn: I am not male. You look upon a female.

• The Polish translation of The Orange Box (Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2) was obviously done by someone who never played or even seen the games. The whole thing was obviously rushed and different games are incosnistent with one another, most notably referring to City 17 as just that in the original, only to turn it into a "Miasto 17" in the episodes. Aside from that, Portal's female protagonist, Chell, is male throughout the whole game. "[Security] breach" is translated as "a cave" and "breach of internal base defenses" (that is, enemies getting past your defenses) as "resistance of the internal base defenses" (what? have your own defenses turned on you or what?). In fact, if you don't know English, then playing with Polish subtitles will leave you completely confused.
  • It's especially tragic to see Portal's trademark dark humor and creepiness completely ruined, because most of the lines in the game are mangled beyond recognition. ^note "Live-fire course" has somehow turned into "live fireproofing test", for starters. And that's just the tip of the cringe-inducing iceberg.
• Polish translation of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time while being fairly decent, contains one. When the Prince rejects Farah's proposition of covering him, because she could hit him, the dialogue in Polish goes like this:

  Farah: I'll cover you.
  Prince: Please, don't. Your duty is to hit me.

  • It actually sounds rather close to snark. And this is the Prince. (Originally he said "You're liable to hit me" - "liable" can mean either "obliged" or "likely". The latter was the intended meaning, but the former is apparently what the translators went with.)
• The original Assassin's Creed is decent, especially considering that the translator had to work exclusively on the audio, which doesn't however excuse a rather jarring slip when "men and women" that were killed at a party are rendered as singular in the translation. Granted, an untrained ear could have trouble distinguishing between "man" and "men" but that obviously doesn't apply to the other gender.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has the Indian Diamond item translated with the adjective "Indiański" rather than "Indyjski", turning it to mean that it's a Native American gemstone - something that would be quite unlikely to be found in early 16th century Italy.
• The Polish version of Scrapland is just atrocious, translating "They're engaged" as "Everyone is busy" (original voiceover says "They're engaged", referring to a female robot and the Big Bad, Polish subtitles say "Everyone is busy" completely out of the ass). More confusing is translating "Stapler" (a type of robot) as "Stapler" through all of the game with an exception of a STORY MISSION OBJECTIVE, where it's translated as "OfficeBot" (Biuras), very similar to the Polish name of "Messenger" (another type of robot).
• The Polish version of SimCity 4: Rush Hour qualifies. Oh, so much. For example, "Free Ride" was translated as "Darmowa Jazda"... "Darmowa" means "free" as in, "for free". Another example, the "abduction" function of the UFO was translated as "obdukcja"... which means "autopsy". And the "chopper" bike in the vehicle selection in "My Sim" mode was translated as "helikopter"... you can guess what that means.
• The Sims 2 expansion Night Life has the "Downtown" area translated as "Przedmieścia", meaning "Suburbia" - the exact opposite of a downtown.
• The Polish version of Submarine Titans translated Depth Mines (as in explosives used to sink subs) as Głębokość Kopalni (The depth of the mine, i.e dig site), while Increased Mine Productivity (yielding faster resource production) as Ziększona produktywność min (min is a dative of miny - explosive charges).
• In the Polish version of Worms 4: Mayhem, weapon known as flood has been translated as żywność, which means... food (the correct translation should be powódź or potop).
  • Worms Armageddon has an official Polish translation which occasionally cuts on some humor but is perfectly legible, and also mostly consistent with localizations of later Worms games. However, it also has a relatively widespread apparently bootleg version of various sins, and inconsistency with official releases is the least of them. Random swearing is introduced into commentary, but it's still nothing compared to non sequiturs such as false friend translation skip "mole bomb" becoming "bombomol", "clothing moth bomb", and "Patsy's Magic Bullet" somehow morphing into "Kula Magiczna Kozła", which is going to be read by anyone aware of enough fairy tales or fantasy as "Billygoat's Magic Ball", with further implications that the goat represents Satan.
• Hitman: Blood Money is poorly localized in general, but the mission A Dance with the Devil contains a particular gem - Maynard John calls 47 an "experiment with genetic TinkerToys" (referring to the popular toy brand)... which is translated as him saying that 47 is a product of a genetic engineering corporation called TinkerToys.
• The original (subtitled) translation to the cult status-holding Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror had a few slips here and there, most of which were fixed in the game's re-releases in the following years. Those included Nico's "I ran out of the couch" as "I fled the couch" instead of "There was no more room on the couch".
• As if Simon the Sorcerer 3D wasn't already bad enough, the Polish translation might just as well have put it out of its misery. The text gets so incomprehensible in places you could swear it was mashed up by Google Translate, all of it gleefully read by an otherwise decent cast. An example includes "a pain in the neck" translated into a literal "pain in the neck", a phrase that, predictaly, has absolutely no meaning in Polish. Some reviewers, who would have normally rated the game as just mediocre, went on the record by saying the 1 or 2 out of 10 they gave it in the end was due to the atrocious translation alone.^note One claimed he had to literally back-translate the entire thing into English in his mind just so he could get the slightest clue as to what the hell everybody was saying.
• Post Mortem (2002) is another example of a well-dubbed game that got partially butchered in the localization process. The translator was apparently unaware that the phrase "don't mention it" can in some context mean "you're welcome, no need to thank me" rather than a suspicious-sounding "please, tell nobody about this", nor had they ever heard any sentence employing "if it weren't for you", which was ultimately rendered as a meaningless "if this [as in, some unspecified object] wasn't from you".
• A mediocre adventure game The Watchmaker, almost totally unknown outside of its native Italy and, apparently, Poland, suffered in the translation department, however that's partly due to the "original" English text being devoid of a good chunk of punctuation marks, which would easily confuse any translator without access to the actual game, and so "Don't think you're going to get away with this Steven" (sic) became "Don't think you're going to elope with this Steven" [as in, "this person whose name is Steven"]. There's plenty more to go around.
• The Longest Journey is held in wide regard as one of the best translations in Poland's gaming history, mostly due to a really good voice cast, but it still didn't avoid at least a few missteps along the way. Upon trying to catch a worm aboard the ship, for instance, April will exclaim "Dang!" whenever she misses and the translation simply leaves it as "Dang!" without much care for meaning.
• Dreamfall avoided similar issues for the most part, save for the section in which Zoë encounters an inn tender and asks her whether the language they're speaking is English, it is rendered in the Polish dubbing as, appropriately enough, "po polsku" ("in Polish"), whereas in the subtitles we can read "po angielsku" ("in English").
• Minecraft Dungeons: On release, the Polish translation had a few gems:
  • The "Potion Barrier" enchantment, which triggers a temporary protective aura upon drinking a potion, was translated as "Aversion To Potions"... implying a barrier that protects AGAINST potions.
  • The Mooshroom Monstrosity, the boss of the secret Mooshroom level, was translated as "Monstrous Mushroom Cow"... even though the boss is a mushroom variant of the Redstone Monstrosity (a large stone golem), not a cow.
  • It's clear that whoever was translating the game got confused by the term "Overworld", and made the fascinating choice of translating it as... "regular world". Literally "regular world" as a common noun (so not even capitalized). Imagine reading sentences where "Overworld" is replaced with "regular world" and you'll get the idea of how awkward this looks.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had quite a few badly translated multiplayer titles (which were awarded for completing challenges), in particular puns, idioms, slang terms, or phrases translated in a way that misses the original context. Some examples: "Reign Down" translated as "Governments", "Absentee Killer" ^note awarded for getting the winning kill with an unmanned sentry gun as "The killer of absentees", "Airborne" as "Born in the air", "No" (negation) as "Nr" ("number"), "Voyeur" ^note awarded for spying on the enemy team with the UAV killstreak as "Traveller", "Pineapple Express" ^note referring to the grenade shape translated as "Divine chillout" ^note which is the Polish title of the referenced movie but makes no sense in context, "Flatliner" ^note awarded for killing enemies while being close to death as "Murderer", or "Owned" (i.e. "defeated") and "Joint Ops" ^note a cannabis-based pun, as evidenced by the title's background art being translated literally.

Hungarian Translations

• The Hungarian dub of The Witcher completely kills the game's climax with an obviously context-deprived translation. As Geralt is about to use his silver sword to kill de Aldersberg, the villain exclaims "That sword is for monsters!". In the Hungarian version, this is translated to "I use this sword against monsters".
• There's a glaring example in the Hungarian translation of one of the Starcraft books, Shadow of the Xel'Naga: the phrase "Wanderers from Afar" (canonical poetic name of the Protoss) was translated as "Wanderers of Afar". As in, Afar remaining un-translated; resulting in "Afar Vándorai" instead of "Messzi Vándorok". The translator probably didn't know that "afar" is an English word too...

Finnish Translations

• In the Finnish back-of-the-box blurb for Escape from Monkey Island, despite there being a boatload of possible piratey phrases to use in Finnish (for example 'Myrsky ja mylväys', the Finnish version of the German 'Sturm und Drang', meaning 'Storm and Stress'), 'Shiver me timbers' was translated directly as 'Täristele puitani', which sounds more like 'Shake my trees' than anything else.
• In the the original The Sims, clicking on a skunk will cause the option "Pet" to pop up. Choosing it will make your sim attempt petting the creature, with invariably stinky results. In the Finnish version, however, the command was translated as "Lemmikki", which is the word for the domesticated animal, not the act of petting something. This can cause the player to believe that choosing the action will make the sim try and get the skunk to be their pet, which is not possible.
• In 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 "Shoot". One can only imagine the disappointment of the players who expected their sim to pull out a gun on the offending nanny...
• A lot of Genesis games had multilingual manuals in Europe with several languages present on every page, each of them separated in their own column which also often had duplicates of whatever screenshot they had originally used there. This naturally often lead into unintentional hilarity, such as the Streets of Rage manual calling Blaze Fielding Pekka Peltonen in Finnish, a hilariously generic male name. The manual for Quackshot replaced the universally accepted Finnish translation of Gyro Gearloose (Pelle Peloton) with a much more literal and a lot more confusing Valle Vaihteeton. Considering how ridiculously popular Donald Duck has always been here, you'd think they would've bothered to look it up a bit more.

Swedish Translations

• The Swedish translation of Dungeon Keeper annoyingly translates "Your minion has fallen in battle" as "Din underhuggare har hamnat i en strid", which actually means "Your minion has ended up in a fight". It also translates the name of the "Mistress of the Dark" character as "Mörkrets älskarinna", which is technically correct... except that "älskarinna" means "mistress" as in "lover", not as in "ruler". Also, if you try dropping coins in the temple pools, the original will tell you that "this is not a wishing-well". The Swedish translation hilariously tells you that "this is not a wish for well-being". Add to this that in the manual, the monsters are listed in alphabetic order, except that the translator didn't bother to change them around when the translation meant that their names began with different letters...
• The Swedish translation of the manual for Super Mario Galaxy translated the word "toad" as "frog". For those not in the know, Mario "toads" are humanoid toadstools. (Though in all fairness, Toad and the toads do always sound like they have a frog in their throat.) It also translated "ray" not as the intended "manta ray", but instead going for "ray" as in "beam".
• The Swedish translation of The Sword of Hope was clearly translated by someone with little knowledge of fantasy and mythology, leading to a lot of butchered terminology. Most memorable is probably the translation of "Treant" to "Trädmyra", literally "Tree ant". It is clearly depicted as a humanoid tree.
  • Also, whenever you came across a chest (as in 'treasure chest'), the translation treated it as the body part, thus making you wonder if you were involved in open heart surgery (or if the chest was perhaps crafted from the above mentioned Treants).
• Tomba! has a few noteworthy examples:
  • Whenever the titular protagonist receives/picks up an item, a text box will appear at the bottom of the screen that reads '<Item Name> Acquired!'. It is possible that the translator thought a direct translation would sound strange in Swedish and decided to be creative. The result: '<Item Name> Mine!'
    • If you skim-read the text box you might mistake the exclamation mark as "i" and read "Mini" instead of "Min!"^note Swedish for "mine!", making you believe that you actually got a smaller version of an item.
  • Leftover text from the English translation can be found in a text box near the beginning of the game when a quest character explains how to locate and defeat the big bads.
  • Around half-way into the game, the player will encounter a man worried about the state of his workplace, the Iron Castle, who exclaims "Geez". The translator interpreted it as "geezer".
• In the English script of Crash of the Titans, this exchange can be heard at the end of the first level:
  Aku Aku: "Dark magic is behind these creatures. Strange things are afoot."
  Crash Bandicoot: *Confused gibberish*
  Aku Aku: "Yes, I know I don't have feet! Let's just go already!"
  • For the Swedish translation the first line was slightly changed, which in turn ruined the foot joke completely:
    Aku Aku: "Dark magic is behind these creatures. Strange things happens around here."
• In all platform versions of Rayman Legends except for Wii U, Murfy can be found in several levels exclaiming "Over here!" as a hint for the player to press the button used to control him (due to the lack of a touch screen). In the Swedish translation it was translated as "Come here!", suggesting that something would happen only by approaching Murfy.

Norwegian Translations

• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 had the phrase "Here goes nothing", commonly said by park guests, translated as "Her går ingenting", meaning "Nothing goes/walks here" and by extension "Nothing works here".
• The Last of Us: When Ellie is trapped in a burning restaurant with the Arc Villain, one of the lines she whispers to him is "Creepy piece of shit!" In the Norwegian subtitles, the translator apparently thought she was referring to the situation being scary instead of the person, and translated her line to "Skumle greier" which means "Scary stuff".
• While the Norwegian Pokémon games remain untranslated, the original instruction booklet for Pokémon Red explained the "Cry"-button on the Pokédex as "Se om en Pokémon gråter", literally "see if a Pokémon is weeping".

Chinese Translations

• When Neverwinter Nights was translated to Chinese, it was done extremely badly.
  • There is a line in the script saying "she kicked me in the teeth." Which was translated into "Grandma kick teeth." Several players thought that this meant an NPC's name was, in fact, "Grandma Kickteeth".
  • But the Grandma Kickteeth saga gets even better/worse. See, the Grandma Kickteeth line was accidentally used as the error-handling text for the subtitles. The English voice acting was not dubbed into Chinese, meaning that when subtitles were replaced at random with "Grandma Kickteeth", it made large parts of the cutscenes incomprehensible.
  • And, because Grandma Kickteeth was error-handling text, it sometimes overwrote plot-important conversations... and never gave you the option to continue the conversation. A round of Memetic Mutation later, Grandma Kickteeth is now the colloquial Chinese phrase for Game Breaking Bugs.
• The Elder Scrolls - yes, the entire franchise name - was mistranslated to "Old Guy Rolls". This is generally understood to mean "old man rolls on a log".
• In Assassin's Creed II, the phrase "Requiescat in pace, bastard" was translated into "Gothic metal bastard". The translator, not knowing what "Requiescat in pace" meant, presumably searched for it on the Internet... and the first result was that it was a song by a Gothic metal band. Now secure in the knowledge that Ezio was just a fan of obscure modern metal bands, the translator proceeded to put the name of the genre, rather than the band name, in the final product.

Other Languages

• A Persian fan translation of Modern Warfare suffers from EXTREME idiotic translation. One notable example is "Ditto" for "Copy that".
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, mailboxes on the fictional Chinese island of Hengsha can be seen that say "Hengsha Post" on the side. However, the Chinese characters used to translate the word "post" refer to something like a post on a bulletin board or message board rather than mail.
  • Also, the translation used for "Court" in "Hengsha Court Garden" actually means "court of law" in Chinese.
  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided applies the same treatment to Czech signs. For example "Do not enter [the restricted area]" is translated as "Nezadávejte" ("Do not input"), "Soft drink" as "Jemný nápoj" ("Gentle drink") and "Delivery storage room" as "Dodávka komora" ("Van pantry").
• The Dutch manual of Gothic 2 translates 'turn undead' as 'ondood worden', which means "become undead". 'Turn undead' is an attack that destroys undead. Doubly stupid, because this is obviously the result of translating the (itself faulty) English translation back to Dutch, instead of translating the original German version directly. There's no way you could confuse "Untote zerstören" (destroy undead) with "Untoter werden" (become undead). Triple ridiculous, because Dutch and German are so similar and easy to translate into each other.
• While the subtitles of the Czech version of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag are decent, the database entries can sometimes be legendarily bad. From translating "Caucasian man" as "man from the Caucassus mountains" (a fairly common error), it goes to mistake the previous protagonist Desmond Miles for a woman and derive the meaning of what "bleeding effect" could possibly be from there, ending up with a sentence that can be paraphrased as: "The public was relieved to hear [Desmond Miles] didn't seem to suffer from any residual periods."
• Subtitles of the Korean version of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare translated "Fire in the hole" as "Shoot in the hole."

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• 78641 - a targ adventure does this on purpose, claiming to be a translation of a "hit Esperanto interactive simulator". While the game itself is in wonderful Engrish, the website takes the cake.
  You experience simulate the game with Keyboard move / execute actions. Game modes are following: Sale mode, Jump Moon, Card Game, many more. You have to get as point as available.
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow translated "Rubicante" as the unintentionally amusing "Lubicant", and "Scarmiglione" became "Skull Millione" - take that, Dante. Likewise, an excellent way to annoy anyone with a passing familiarity with Hindu mythology is to refer, as they did, to a certain bloodthirsty goddess as "Curly".
  • The English translation of The Magic of Scheherezade also calls Kali, "Curly". Among other misnames.
    • Amusingly, Kali from NieR was originally called Curly in the Japanese version.
  • Castlevania III's translation from Japanese to English mangled "Vernandes" into "Belnades."
  • A significant portion of Castlevania II's dialogue was assumed to be this; as it turns out, they're supposed to be lying (or at least misleading)
  • An interesting subversion. The beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is called "Final Stage: Bloodlines". Most players assumed it meant the Genesis game, Castlevania: Bloodlines. What it actually is, though, is the name of the final stage from Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.
  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia mixes this with Lost in Translation by renaming the item that bestows the Double Jump "Ordinary Stone.", when it was originally "ひしょう石", a.k.a "Gemstone".
  • The entire Castlevania series has double-dipped this trope on numerous proper names, and then made those mistranslations canonical. One fairly well-known example is Olrox, who is very plainly Count Orlok. The kicker is that this isn't to avoid copyright infringement, it's just mangled in double-conversion between western and Japanese phonemes.
• Chaos Wars, a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between several RPG series (And shooter series Gungrave for spice), was localized by O3 Entertainment. Leaving aside its bad voice acting, the translation itself was extremely poor. Shadow Hearts Smug Snake Nicolai got his name translated as "Nicole", every single "Breath" attack was translated as "Bless" (so you'd better watch out when that red dragon uses its Fire Bless on you) and—most glaringly—they translated the game title "Rebirth Moon" as "Reverse Moon" even though an English logo sits right below where they wrote this.
  • There are many who argue for literal Russian transliteration, arguing about "Nikolai" versus "Nicholi". "Nicole", however, is hilarious.
  • They also quite obviously never even glanced at the official translations of the games they take characters of; they render the Shadow Hearts main known in the US as "Yuri" as "Uru" instead, and also render the "Hiyoko Bug" as a "Chick Bug" — although this is an accurate translation of Hiyoko, the Generation of Chaos and Spectral series games translated by NIS America and Atlus USA have always just left it as Hiyoko.
    • They were probably going for Ulmanov/Urmanov, which is a legitimate Russian name (a surname actually), if kind of obscure.
  • Furthermore, at least some of these changes were unavoidable, as they would have needed to buy the rights to use the translated terms from the respective US companies.
• A mistake in the SNES translation of Chrono Trigger has Gaspar saying "One of you is close to someone that needs help. Find this person... fast", which seemed to imply the existence of an additional quest apart from the several he mentioned (most often believed to be one to save Schala); further confusion arises from the fact that this line disappears once you defeat Queen Zeal (and likely all of the other sidequests). In the DS remake, this is corrected to have him tell the player to speak to each of the party members for clues on the quests. Melcior's response to seeing the Rainbow Shell is "This is a very rare!"
• Though most of the languages in Civilization V are pretty good, Attila's Chuvash is so bad that about half his article on the wiki is just trying to figure out what he was supposed to be saying. Case in point: one of his phrases, meant to be something like "Continue", actually translates to "Forward do."
• Many gamers claim Crusader of Centy's "The data have been saved" is of bad translation, but is actually a grammatically correct sentence. ("Data" is plural for the seldom-used "datum"). No such excuse for the rest of the game, though...
• Some of the text (particularly for abilities and battle) aren't translated right in the original DS version of Devil Survivor:
  • The description for Battle Aura says it blocks damage that's "> 50", instead of "< 50" damage like it actually does.
  • Force skills descriptions read: "Effect:STONE", but it doesn't turn the enemy into stone, it insta-kills an opponent who is already stone.
  • Watchful says you gain 75% exp with it equipped, which sounds like you'd be missing out on exp, when what it actually does is give you Leaked Experience.
  • Overclocked corrects the above errors, but brings a new one to the table: Cursed Dance's description indicates it does damage equal to "caster's HP/4", but it actually does damage equal to "target's (current) HP/4".
• Digimon World Data Squad, translated by Aksys GL, for years was the contender for worst-translated Digimon game. Among its screw-ups was translating "Mao", for the Japanese phrase "Maou/Ma-Oh", which has previously been officially translated as "Demon Lord" in material dating back to Saban's dubs of the series, and was currently in use at the time by Disney. Pertinent, as the entire game? You are fighting the Digimon franchise's Seven Demon Lords. Which only got worse when it was later revealed the bad guy wanted to create the "Cho-Mao" Digimon. With the translated term's use by two companies known for censorship, and the game being rated E10+? The only remaining explanation is incompetence.
  • To be fair to Namco Bandai, Aksys GL hadn't even been operational for a year yet, so their horrendous blind idiot translation record hadn't been established yet.
  • "Bantyo" instead of "Banchou". Banchou's are the leaders of schoolyard delinquent Gangs with an honorable code of conduct, the protagonist of Digimon data squad, described as a street fighter in the dub, was a banchou. This is pertinent, as one of the Digimon fought is banchouLeomon, and the entire fight revolves around him caring more about his title than the duties held by a Banchou. Due to the translation error and the failure to translate the term, the REASON why they are fighting is completely unintelligible. It's worth nothing however that the official Japanese romanization was Bantyo and wasn't changed to Bancho until a few years after the release of the game, meaning it was accurate to the official Japanese romanization at the time.
• In Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, almost every technology pun was entirely lost. "Junk Park" translated as "Galacta Park" "Coulomb City" Changed to Kowloon...the list just goes on and on. Not made any better by how many lines were entirely rewritten, which was plainly notable by a lot of players who understood Japanese.
  • One of the best scenes of the game was ruined by the foolish substitution of "Digifuse" in place of the simple declaration of "Gattai/Combine", which is a pretty common phrase seen of so many series the expectation of the correct translation is automatic. Worse, Digifuse (Or Digixros as it's also known) refers to a specific type of combination, and you cannot substitute in a specific term in place of a more generalized term. Not helped that the specific type of combination that was taking place? It's a type of fusion known as "Jogress/DNA Digivolution", which by established series lore could not be more different. this is only exasperated, by Digifuse not existing in the game, while DNA digivolution was a regularly used and established concept in the game's Digimon raising. Thus this fails in making anyone NOT familiar with the franchise scratch their heads on what Digifuse even IS.
  • At some points in the game characters talk about a Bakemon, even though there is no particularly significant Bakemon in the entire game. The reason is because they mistranslated "bakemono" (as in a monster) as Bakemon, which makes the sentences lose much of the sense they had.
  • Traditionally, Attributes are the term for the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors system that has all Digimon classified into Data, Vaccine, Virus, Free, and Variable. The games introduce another Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system on top of that, but the English translation ended up switching the names. So what should be "Attribute" reads "Type" and vice-versa. To complicate matters further, "Type" was already used as a term for a Digimon's family such as "Reptile".
• The MMORPG Digimon Battle's text was pretty much translated using Google Translate. The website's just as bad.
• Digimon Survive was a marked improvement from Cyber Sleuth above but a few glaringly obvious issues crop up here and there in the English translation. Missing words in sentences, a Biyomon being referred to as a Patamon for a couple of lines, and inconsistency on any given Digimon's gender even in the exact same scene.
  Takuma: (What describes the real Labramon?) "He loves Aoi to bits."
  Takuma: "The real Labramon just adores you, Aoi. She would hate to lose you, wouldn't she?"
• The SEA version of the MMORPG Dragon Nest has some very inconsistent and sometimes word for word translations into English. While 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.
  • Some quest texts tell you to go to one dungeon when you have to go to another completely different dungeon located in a different map. One quest in particular has the quest giver NPC tell you to go to one place, the quest text tell you to go to another, and both are wrong.
  • 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, all the text turns into squares,◊ except for the player's name and the lines where the player must pick an answer.
  • There is not much consistency, either. Paralyze and Stun sometimes overlap in skill/equipment descriptions, and sometimes a skill says it "can only be used when paralyzed", when in fact it can be used whenever you're staggered. The term "Fatigue" is used for both the FTG status every character has, and Lancea's unique self debuff caused by all skills in the Erratic Power skill tree. Gargoyles are often called Gargoiles, Minotaurs become Minitaurs, and sometimes characters have their names romanized in different ways in the same conversation.
  • Skill tooltips often forget to mention something, and some have actual wrong information. e.g. Acrobat's Spirit Shot's tooltip says it's a magical attack when it's actually physical, Tempest's Hurricane Dance never mentions you can use the special attack button to activate Double Somersault Kick after using it, and Sting Breezer's Poking Beehive EX says you have to hit your Piercing Spikes with it for them to explode but you can actually just cast Poking Beehive EX wherever you want and the spikes will explode anyway.
• From the original Dragon Quest Monsters game:
  Terry looked in front. There are some yummy food.
• The copyright disclaimer for the Japanese version of Express Raider says: "If you are playing this outside the country of Japan, YOU ARE ENJOYING IN A PRIME!"(You are involved in a crime)
• The MMORPG Fairy Story Online has terrible translations. One questionable mistranslation is that the mages are in the 'naughty' type, contrast with the somewhat correct 'sympthathetics' and 'braves'.
• The Fatal Fury series is no stranger to bad translations, but the best of the lot is in Fatal Fury Special. Wolfgang Krauser's ending shows a picture of him holding a glass of wine, with the text below stating "WOW! What a tough!". Whilst this is already pretty funny, the clincher is that the endings also contained voice acting. Krauser's voice actor, B.J. Love, repeated this incredibly silly line without any alteration. Seeing as he was the only voice actor who is a native English speaker, you'd have thought he'd have pointed this out! In the Japanese version, his line was やはり私を満足させる奴はいないようだな。 (Naturally, there seems to be no one who can satisfy me!)
• The Final Fantasy series has had a few corkers:
  • Final Fantasy IV (the SNES translation) has a lot of translation errors. Because of Square's policy at the time all of the translation had to be done in-house in Japan, it resulted in a lot of typos, punctuation errors, and enemy name butchery. For example, "White Dragon" was translated as "Pale Dim." Though it's mostly from Nintendo Of America's iron-fisted censorship, how they got Dim from Dragon is a riddle of the ages.
    • More a case of lack of playtesting, but the Spanish translation of IV Advance has Rosa's mother ask where her daughter "NAME_ROZA)" is.
    • Additionally, the translators accidentally filled in the blanks, meaning Tellah was Edward/Gilbert's father. Seeing how the whole "spoony bard" incident wouldn't make any sense, the PS1 versions and onward fixed this error.
    • Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia, Rubicante, and Calcabrina had their names translated as Milon, Kainazzo, Valvalis, Rubicant (there's a difference), and Calbrena^note due to the strict 8-character limit for enemy/boss names in the SNES version. Someone didn't catch the The Divine Comedy references... The PS1 version only corrected Cagnazzo's name, but left the others the same as SNES.
    • According to the iOS version of the game, Cecil is the "Load Captain" (lord captain) of the Red Wings.
    • The iOS remake of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (at least initially) overlooked Golbez's Dub Name Change in one instance, calling him "Golbeza" on the menu screen.
    • The dialogue of the SNES version borders on Translation Train Wreck. Some highlights include "Do not fight now! Fighting when mist will freeze you with Breath!" and "You, the man of Darkness, using it does not mean anything to me, you fools!" A more accurate translation for those two lines are "The mist makes all attacks ineffective! If you attack, you'll be killed by the dragon's breath!" and "Fool! The Crystal sheds no light for those with hearts of darkness!"
    • The famous "Spoony Bard" line, however, actually is correct English. "Spoony" is an obscure, but valid, English word meaning, roughly, a sentimental fool. Hence why that line was not fixed in the remake, which fixed many of the mistakes. The developers even inserted a note into the game regarding this saying, "But the bard was spoony, we checked."
    • The J2E Fan Translation of Final Fantasy IV was pretty bad - lack of respect for official terminology (クアル/Cure became "Keal", pretty far removed from both, which was fixed in the final release), overuse of swearing, entire lines of dialogue made up out of thin air or taken from the SNES translation (Tellah's "you spoony bard", Scarmiglione remarking that "you beat me twice"), shoehorned 1990s pop culture references, misspellings, and a general sense of unprofessionalism. One problem in particular sticks out, though: There's a dungeon partway through the game with an unusually strong magnetic field inside that prevents metallic weapons and armor from being used. The fan translators apparently consistently misread "jiryoku" (magnetic force) as "juuryoku" (gravity). Plot holes arise, of course, in that it's never explained why the characters can still move normally despite the increased gravity, or why metallic items can't be used in it.
    • In the SNES version, during the battle with the final boss, Zeromus, there's a message after Black Hole is used that is mistranslated. It says "Magics became invalid," which confused many players. What its actual effect is that it erases all positive effects on your party members. Later translations clarify what Black Hole's effect is.
  • Final Fantasy V (the PS1 translation) has a character named Faris, who was adopted at a very young age. As it turns out, her real name is Sarisa, and her adoptive name was simply all she could pronounce at the time. The English translator apparently never got the joke and instead went with... "Salsa".
    • There were also several notoriously badly translated enemy names. The Wyvern enemy was rendered in said translation as "Y-Burn". There was also a squid enemy called "Soccer". People were left wondering what connection this mollusk had to footy until the GBA remake, where the enemy's name was properly transliterated as "Sucker".
    • Not to mention, the name of the first boss. "Karl Boss" (actually Karabos), anyone?
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • While it wasn't quite as bad as some of the other games in the series due to the Woolseyisms, but it still had its moments of jarring dialog. For example, there's the classic "I owe you one, so I'm going to jam up your opera" line from Ultros that wasn't fixed on the GBA (It really said "I can't stand you guys, so I'm gonna mess up the opera!"). The game also mistranslated "Biggs" as "Vicks." In addition, the spell "Meltdown" became "Merton" — even if they had to change it because of Character Name Limits, surely they could have come up with something that didn't evoke a certain sociologist.
    • There's also the "Relic Ring" in the SNES and PS1 translations that claim the Relic Ring makes the body cold. However, due to the description being poorly translated, it left many gamers confused on what it actually does: It turns the wielder undead, meaning healing in battle harms them. Later translations, beginning with the GBA version, call this the Lich Ring and translates its description properly.
  • Final Fantasy VII had its own translation issues◊. The French translation also has some pearls like "I am one of the rightful heirs to this planet", which was better translated by Google than it was in the game itself. It all starts in the title screen credits with "Executive Produce."
    • The Guard Scorpion is supposed to be a Warmup Boss, with a simple gimmick to show off the active-time battle system; attacking at the wrong time ^note namely, when its tail is pointing upwards will result in a nasty counterattack. However, Cloud's advice on how to fight it was worded awkwardly and the gap between the messages appearing made it misleading, leading to players doing the exact opposite of what they had to do. Cloud yells "Barret, be careful! Attack while its tail's up! It'll counterattack with its laser!" "Attack while its tail's up!" appeared in its own textbox, making it seem like a definite command, rather than a warning against it.
    • On top of this, some lines were accidentally duplicated and assigned to different characters. A localizer then combed through the dialogue and played with it to give each character their distinctive 'voice'. The results are mystifying:
      (context - Cloud is about to enter a brothel.)
      Cloud: "...Hmm. That's how you'll fool them."
      Aeris: ".........Hmmmmmmm. So that's how you fooled them."
  • Final Fantasy VII also gives us the classic boss name mistranslation "Safer Sephiroth", which is not actually "safer" by any stretch of the imagination. It's meant to be "Sefer", which is Hebrew and goes with the Kabbalah reference in Sephiroth's name. (It's often speculated to be "Seraph," but the katakana for that word would be different.)
  • Bizarro Sephiroth is often thought to be this, but it's actually something of a clumsy Woolseyism - the katakana for the name is リバース セフィロス (Ribāsu Sefirosu), which can be read as either "Rebirth Sephiroth" or "Reverse Sephiroth". Since both could potentially fit (though it is generally agreed it was most likely intended to be the former), the translators decided to Take a Third Option instead.
  • Don Corneo's pet that is fought at the beginning of the sewers is called Abzu in Japanese, named after the Mesopotamian god of fresh water. It ended up being translated as "Aps". It happened a second time with Rabzu, the boss fought at the end of the Wutai sidequest, which became "Rapps".
  • The Midgar Zolom, the Boss in Mook Clothing that patrols the swamps near the Chocobo Farm, is supposed to be called the Midgardsormr, named after the serpent from Norse mythology. It carries no connection to Midgar itself.
  • Scarlet and Heidegger's Humongous Mecha fought during the Midgar raid is known as the Proud Clad in Japanese. In English, mistranslation ended up giving it the rather silly name "Proud Clod" ("clod" being a synonym for "idiot"). What's even more baffling is that one of its targetable parts, the Jammer Armor, was mistranslated as "Jammar Armor"... but the attack it uses, Materia Jammer, was translated correctly!
  • Hojo's second form is "Heretic Hojo", a clear reference to both the horrific nature of what he has turned into as well as the depraved, inhuman nature of his experiments in general and how they violate the natural order of nature. The localization renders it as "Helletic Hojo", which by comparison isn't even a word.
  • The English translation had a minor error in one of Cloud's Limit Break moves. It was supposed to be "Climb Hazard" ("Kuraimu Hazādo" in Japanese, referencing the attack's effectiveness against aerial enemies), but was mistranslated into English as "Climhazzard".
  • Although corrected in rereleases, Barret's Ungarmax Limit Break is meant to be "Angermax".
  • "This guy are sick", instead of "The person in there is sick".
  • During the Whole Episode Flashback 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", bafflingly implying Tifa was wearing underwear that doubled as a spinal appliance.
  • Another Final Fantasy VII example is translating Odin's "Gunguniru" (Gungnir, Odin's spear from mythology) as "Gunge Lance", leaving English players wondering what the hell slime has to do with the attack. Likewise, his Zantetsuken attack which literally translates to "Iron-Cutting Blade" and is generally left untranslated in every FF game after 7, was translated as Steel-Bladed Sword.^note Pretty much every sword in the world has a steel blade, and steel probably couldn't cut iron. Then again, maybe in FF7's world, steel is some kind of wondrous divine material that's even better than Mythril.
    • Even worse is the German version, which was obviously translated from the English one. Why? Because every other English line is left untranslated. And no, it's not a case of Gratuitous English, when random lines like "He's scary!" or "I'm so nervous" suddenly appear in an all-German text for no reason. When Yuffie asks Cloud to give her all the Materia after they have defeated Sephiroth, the translators apparently decided to take a break in the middle of their work and ended up forgetting to finish the translation of one textbox which resulted in the (in German communities often quoted and by now legendary) sentence "It's all in there, read it sorgfältig durch" (read it carefully). This made the quote unintentionally comical and people still refer to it as a prime example of bad translations. Also, some attack and weapon names were mistranslated horribly. For example, "Drain" became "Rohr," which means "sewer-pipe" instead of "to drain of something", and Materia and spell names often got varying translations in different places of the game. It was often hard to make out what you actually just equipped.
    • Speaking of Germany in Final Fantasy VII, let's not forget that "Ahriman" was translated as "Allemagne", the French word for Germany.
    • On top of some very strange... choices, what was especially baffling about the French translation was that there were sometimes missing words or, at the other end of the spectrum, words or entire sentences repeated for no reason.
    • In Spain, Ahriman was translated to Alemania, Spanish for Germany. Also, the translators managed to call Aeris both a woman and a man in the very same dialog box, multiple times (and did that to Tifa and Jesse, and probably any female character, too). And Allévoy, a typo of Allá voy (Here I come) is an actual meme. Sífilo is a meme too; it's one of many typos of Sephiroth/Sefirot that happens to look (and sound) very similar to syphilis. Also, when you talk with a child in Costa del Sol, he says, more or less It hurts when you kick [the ball] with your bare feet; in Spanish, it got translated to It hurts when you kick me with your bare feet. Yuffie says let's go instead of let go to Don Corneo's henchmen, and the time when she says GROSS-NESS is just untranslated. Oh, and Absorb MP materia, in some games, had the description text: Summons Knights of the Round Table. The Spanish translation for FFVII was horribly catastrophic that to list its flaws would take a whole 'nother wiki.
    • Strangely enough, in the aforementioned horrible Spanish translation, Cloud correctly indicates Barret to NOT attack the Guard Scorpion when its tail is up. Guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
  • In one treasure chest in Inside of Gaea's Cliff, you find an item called "Last Elixir", but when examining your inventory, no such item can be found. It turns out "Last Elixir" is just the Japanese name for Megalixir, and the translation team simply forgot to change the name in that one instance.
  • The recurring monster Cockatrice was translated as Cokatolis.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics has a notoriously bad translation, with such gems as mistranslating "Fire Breath" as "Fire Bracelet", and being totally inconsistent with name spellings (such as Luveria/Ruvelia). The game also has a baffling number of bizarre spelling errors and quite a few odd expressions brought on by procedurally generated text ("Thanks to Squire, we succeeded" when having a squire in a proposition party helped). Thankfully, the PSP port fixed that problem with a brand new translation that actually makes sense (and is in fact pretty cool).
    • And now you know how the Assassins' "Stop Bracelet" could cause Instant Death.
    • "This was the darkened items won't appear"?
    • "Defeat Dycedarg's Elder Brother", an infamous mission instruction, actually means for you to "defeat your elder brother, Dycedarg" since Dycedarg has no elder brother, and Dycedarg is the elder brother of both the protagonist and an NPC who assists you during the fight.
  • One Final Fantasy X fan, dissatisfied with the English voice dub, was hoping to play a subtitled copy bought on eBay. Instead that person got something else entirely. The "Guado" race is now the "Chubby" race, "Jyscal" is "Jessica," and Walter (Wakka) is a good egg. Of course, this is actually a parody of bad translations.
  • There's also a surprising amount of Ho Yay in the translation, such as "I feel happy that Walter wants to arouse me".
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The out-sourced translators originally screwed up Chocobo. Always written チョコボ (Chokobo)/Chocobo, both in Japanese and English, the initial translation of the game instead used 馬鳥 (Umatori), which was subsequently direct-translated to 'Horse-bird'. Even better, fan outcry-spurred change resulted in a global correction to Chocopo. It was fixed (for real) soon after.
    • After the Garo series Crossover Content Patch added in special armors and titles from that franchise into the game as PVP rewards, players found the title for the Makai Knight "Dan" (the armor being for Dragoons), had been mistranslated as "Dam"...despite at no point in japanese-to-english translation does 'n' ever convert into an 'm'. This would end up patched after a Month, before which the "Dam" title quickly became the most popular of the Event titles to be seen used by players.
  • Final Fantasy IX lost some of its callbacks to previous games through "Blind Idiot" Translation. Mount Gulug was supposed to be Mount Gulg, referencing Gurgu Volcano from the first game. Mog's true identity, Madeen was supposed to be Maduin (both are romanized and pronounced the same), referencing the Esper from Final Fantasy VI, and her attack, "Terra Homing", was supposed to be "Terraforming". Other gems include "Maliris" instead of "Marilith" (the proper name of the fiend known as "Kary" in early translations of the first game) and "Rally-ho!" instead of "Lali-ho!" ("Lali-ho!" being the cry of the dwarves in Final Fantasy IV). Freya's long-lost love, Sir Fratley, was possibly meant to be Flatley, a reference to Michael Flatley, an Irish-American step dancer and actor.
    • According to the translators, however, Executive Meddling is the reason for most of these changes, as apparently the players were supposed to figure out the references themselves.
    • It could also be argued that Fratley's name is more a case of A Lizard Named "Liz" since he's from a race of Rat Men.
  • While it's often said that the boss Valia Pira was supposed to be Barrier Pillar, the katakana for the boss's name actually deliberately uses the "va" katakana - they write it as ヴァリアピラ (Varia Pira), whereas "Barrier Pillar" would be バリアピラー (Baria Pirā - also note the long "a" sound). Quina's Limit Glove move is another case of this - it's often thought to be "Limit Globe", but again, it's deliberately spelled with the "vu" katakana - リミットグローヴ (Rimitto Gurōvu), instead of リミットグローブ (Rimitto Gurōbu).
  • Even Final Fantasy had an example of this. The English translation rendered Marilith's name as Kary due to fear of legal issues from TSR, who had a monster of that name in Dungeons and Dragons, which Final Fantasy was heavily based of off. It was actually supposed to be Kālī, a reference to the Hindu goddess of the same name.
  • There is also a theory that the recurring ice summon Shiva was actually supposed to be called Shiver, and was mistranslated with the name of a Hindu god that doesn't really fit (apart from being male - though Hindu deities are technically genderless - Hindu Shiva has nothing to do with ice whatsoever). The series does eventually play off this name as Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings introduces Shiva's lover Shivar, who is basically Shiva, but Male and slightly weaker. (His Japanese name though is Darling Shiva)
• Final Fight suffered from nonsensical names that were supposed to be something else. In particular, mix-ups 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.
• The rendering of "Shiroma" and "Kuroma" from the Final Fantasy side-games as "Shirma" and "Croma" in post-merger translations. These are technically acceptable romanizations, but result from the translator apparently being completely oblivious to the Punny Name nature of the original names — it would make more sense to change the names entirely to something that has a similar joke... or, failing that, to romanize them directly to maintain the original joke for people who would still get it.
  • The names are not only punny, they are also meaningful: "Shiromadoushi" means "White Mage" and "Kuromadoushi" means "Black Mage": Exactly what those two are. Giving them 8-Bit Theater -esque names would probably have been more appropriate for the translation.
• The North American version of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn manages to translate a use of "Fire Emblem" in game as "heart of fire", yes they mistranslated the titular MacGuffin while getting it right in the title. Yes, Heart of Fire is a valid translation otherwise, but come on, how do you do that...
  • Possibly because in the title of the game, "Fire Emblem" is written in katakana as ファイアーエムブレム (Faiā Emuburemu), but in the actual game dialogue, the term is written in Japanese.
  • In the same game, the Four Riders (a title granted to the four highest ranking generals) of Daein are mistranslated as the Four Horsemen in the Black Knight's profile. Again, a valid translation (and if used consistently, would have been better), but it's quite the mistake.
  • Muarim's profile is for some reason the same as Mist's.
• In Gargoyle's Quest, Firebrand fights "Rushifell" (Lucifer) to determine which of them is the true Red Blaze.
• GHOST Squad has an example that become a short-lived meme on its board on GameFAQs:
  "The mine will explode when the time becomes 0!"
• Golden Sun hilariously translated several attacks wrongly. Most of these ("Death Size" (Scythe), the Blessing (Breath) attacks) were fixed in The Lost Age... only for confusion to hit Ulmuch (Hsu) (the translators had apparently forgotten his Dub Name Change) and Dullahan's "Formina Sage" (Fulminous Edge) attack.
• In the game Graffiti Kingdom, there are several small mistakes in grammar. "It is time for tea almost" instead of "It is almost time for tea", and such things like that.
• A fangame series called Happy Tree Friends Adventures has hilariously broken English. For example, during the credits roll, "Designer" is often misspelled as "Desinger". Another example is "Choose You Character" in the character selection screen. The creator of that series is Polish and isn't really good at English, so the games serve many typos from his Engrish.
  • A Wario Land fangame called Wario Land: Legends of 6 Crystals also suffers from this, as it's made by the same creator as the above. However, a few of the lines are surprisingly written in proper English, which is obviously written by a different person other than the creator.
• The publisher company Natsume couldn't decide on a romanization for its own name at first: it used the Kunrei-shiki romanization "Natume" in Harvest Moon 64's title screen, not to mention the prominent message telling you to "Push the Start".
  • They also spelled "sofa" as "Sopha", "flour" as "Flower", and stone as "Sone" in Friends of Mineral Town.
    • That's more the territory of really bad spelling than really bad translation, though. (Incidentally, Natsume is horrible about that in general - problems with its/it's/its', their/there, and commas are to be expected in all things Harvest Moon.)
  • They just plain forgot in one instance with Zack in Friends of Mineral Town; he still speaks Japanese if you attempt to speak to him often enough as he picks up shipped items.
    • Untranslated Japanese text appears in Harvest Moon DS too, usually during sidequests.
    • Worse than that is the local priest, Carter. At one point in the game, you can ask several characters to pick grapes with you. If you ask Carter, he says "A part-time job in the vineyard sounds like lots of fun." In German.◊
  • "g Rod "hing RodCopper Fishin For Fishing" - The description for the fishing rod.
  • '"A Wonderful Life'' and its related games have numerous errors. Their translation of the Special Edition was especially bad, with Lumina being referred to as Muffy on a few occasions.
  • Their translation of River King Mystic Valley is... special. A lot of the characters in it are from Japanese folklore and mythology... but Natsume was apparently totally oblivious to this. If the manual is anything to go by, you get Tenuki instead of Tanuki, Arai Adzuki instead of A(d)zuki-Arai (They apparently mistook it for a personal name, rather than the name of the type of creature he is, and reversed it into "Western order"), the kamaitachi (literaly "Scythe Weasel") simply as "Weasel", Kapa instead of Kappa (yes, it does make a difference), and Nurikabe as "Plaster Wall" (An accurate literal translation, but sounds ridiculous as a name for a creature in English).
  • After you've completed a mini game, you get a "CLEAR!" message in big letters (as in "FINISHED!"). In the German version, it says "LÖSCHEN!" (as in "DELETED!"). (And this isn't Lumines.)
  • In Harvest Moon and Harvest Moon GB, the text "火の元かくにん！" ("Checking to make sure the stove is off!") was rendered in awkward literal-translationese as "Confirm the origin of fire!"
• The House of the Dead series, especially the second game, is defined by its amusing translation. It takes skill to have voice actors you've just grabbed off of the street say lines like "Don't come! Don't come!" without snickering.
  • The French subtitles were just terrible. "La maudite La Roue du Destin... Nous devons la détruire !" i.e. "The cursed The Wheel of Fate... We must destroy it !"
• The official English translation of If My Heart Had Wings is rather infamous for being pretty spotty at times. Aside from one or two entire scenes that were rendered nigh incomprehensible (in particular, a sequence early in Ageha's route where Aoi gets a reputation for two-timing on the grounds that he's hung out with lots of different girls in a short span of time, and... well, that was about all anyone could get from it, anyway), there are numerous occasions of lines being clearly translated out of context. At one point, a 'sempai' from Yoru is translated as 'Aoi' even though she's clearly talking about Kotori; at another the characters are talking about Tobioka and then inexplicably start referring to him with female pronouns for a few lines; and in yet another, a line from Hotaru that was clearly supposed to be 'Ao-nii, I'm scared' was translated as 'Ao-nii, you're scary'.
• The English translation of Illusion of Gaia was Bowdlerized like a lot of other SNES titles at the time, but it goes way beyond that. A lot of context is missing due to the translation and Bowdlerization. The syntax is often wildly incorrect. Some lines that were supposed to be thoughts or narration are spoken out loud instead. Some words were translated as things that weren't even remotely close, i.e. translating "violinist" as "violent". The translation even has a few lines said by the wrong character. A list of some of the more egregious errors and more accurate translations can be found here.
• Iron Tank: The Invasion of Normandy for the NES: "SNAKE! Watch out, use radar, gigantic enemy objects ahead". "Found the train firing bullets by radar". "I'm your friend. Stay on the railroad, go straight through the town. The enemy train is there. Shoot it." "Enemy's long range bullets are awesome. Allies are destroyed." "Look out ahead, there is the long range firing bullet. Destroy it immediately. The safety of the back up unit is your goal."
• In the English version of Ishar 2, the citizens of the main city greet you with "Welcome presumptuous travelers!".
• The IOS game Kawaii Pet MEGU has this in the English version. It has awkward text like "He is wearing perfect smile", though this may be indirectly part of the game's appeal.
• In order to sucker people into thinking it was an actual Pokémon game (the gameplay of the original game is a bit similar in that respect), someone - probably a Chinese bootlegger - created a pirated version of Keitai Denjuu Telefang in which the game (besides being bugged up the ASS) is translated into English. If you can call it English, at least:
  "Some points of X lost!"
  "I want to somewhere by the way and will return!"
  • This one is famous. You want an example? The water world is called Alice.
• If a Keyboardmania arcade machine detects a problem with the wheel during its power on self-test sequence, it will say "PLEASE WHEEL REPAIR. WE DO THE APOLOGY FOR ANY INCONVENIENT."
• In the North American version of Kingdom Hearts II, some of the Organization XIII members' original names were mistranslated. Xigbar's original name was rendered as Bleig instead of the correct Braig, Xaldin's as Dilin instead of Dilan and Lexaeus's as Eleus instead of Aeleus. This is especially notable because the Organization member's names are supposed to be anagrams of their "original names," plus the letter X, so any spelling mistakes stand out like a fire engine.
  • While not a bad translation by any means, the English release of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days suffers from unfortunate inconsistency issues with the names of some Heartless, especially for those who have played previous games. For example, the Heartless known as "Loudness" in all Japanese versions is called "Crescendo" in the English version of Kingdom Hearts II, but renamed to "Loudmouth" in the English version of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Other examples are "Surveillance" in Japanese, called "Surveillance Robot" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Watcher" in Days, "Mad Dog" in Japanese called "Rabid Dog" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Bad Dog" in Days, and "Aiming Cannon" in Japanese called "Cannon Gun" in Kingdom Hearts II and "Li'l Cannon" in Days. They already had English names, why give them new ones?
  • An example from Kingdom Hearts II itself is the Heartless named Magnum Loader. Sounds like a good enough name (it only appears in Space Paranoids and the related episode in Hollow Bastion), until you realise its Japanese name was "Magna Roader", which, aside from making infinitely more sense (since the Heartless has a wheel and "drives" around), is also a Shout-Out to the enemies of the same name from Final Fantasy VI.
• Much like with Super Smash Bros. Melee, the French, Italian, German and Spanish translations of Kirby Air Ride leave entire bits of text in English.
• The American translation of Klonoa Advance 2: Dream Champ Tournament translates Guntz' name to "Gantz", and one of the messages the guide robot says in World 4 ends with "Gabi!" instead of "Naga!"
• Most of the changes to the English script of Knights in the Nightmare are just removal of characters' accents, name changes due to length restrictions or for rank pulling, and the alteration of all text into standard polite English. Some of the translation conventions, however, cross into this territory:
  • The original Japanese script had a female Lance Knight named Meslieness and an NPC poet named Marion. For whatever reason, Meslieness' name was changed to Marion, and Marion's name to Mervyn. Something that might irritate those who preferred the original script perhaps, but nothing catastrophic—except for the fact that in the game and the few translated bonus materials, "Mervyn" was still referred to as "Marion" in many places, causing a lot of confusion.
  • Then there are the item names. Atlus has always shown confusion on how to translate the name of the item ココリの実 ("Kokori no Mi"), which has variably been written as Applecot, Kokorinut, and Applecot Nut; however, it was the "Upola Statue" item which was the most egregious example in the game—the translation that had stood for the past two entries (and their two remakes) was changed to Upora Statue, evidently out of L/R flip confusion.
  • And... Marietta's signature attack, which in Japanese has always been リヴェリオン (usually Romanized as "Rivellion" by Sting) and has always been translated as "Angelic Thunder" by Atlus, was suddenly changed to Rebellion without explanation.
• The Legend of Dragoon had an amusing example. Since the characters shout out their attack names, the incredibly literal "Gust of Wind Dance" (supposed to be "Gale Dance") just becomes Narmtastic.
  • Heck, the whole game was filled with moments like this. Particularly bad during cutscenes that are supposed to be serious.
  • The strange thing about the game's translation is its unevenness. It starts out fairly decent (only a bit below the level of, say, Final Fantasy VII) but seems to get worse as the game goes on. Some scenes are positively tear-jerking, only to be followed by laugh-out-loud terrible comments on the same event.
• Legendary Wings:
  "The devil is waiting for us in the palace. Rush courageously."
  "X areas are still to be cleare. Hold out for final victory".
  "You have saved human race from its extinction. Thank you for playing".
• The Little Busters! Visual Guide Book that comes with the game's perfect edition actually includes an English translation for the descriptions of the few game CGs the book highlights. This might seem odd, as Japanese developers are generally very much against foreigners playing their games, but a quick glance at English provided makes it very clear that people who can actually speak the language were not the intended audience. For example, the description for a CG of Rin surrounded by cats reads:
  Rin sunk in the bath of cats.
  She is little shy, so going good with cats, same characteristic features.
  If stranger came near them, all will gone.
• Lufia & The Fortress of Doom contains several instances of awkward dialogue. Sometimes it's punctuated wrong, sometimes it's gramatically incorrect, but mostly the dialogue is just incoherent and/or random with what's happening in the story.
  • The "Safe Tea Ring".
  • Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has some translation problems as well, but it looks as if Lufia: The Legend Returns's script wasn't even proofread. Stock example: "This is what I call frue destruction!"
• Lux-Pain. The entire game is littered with examples. Most is fairly tame, maybe adding or missing a letter, or changing one. Then at times it simply gets confusing, such as using "he/him" when they should have used "she/her". Or forgetting if it's in Japan or America. Or calling characters by the wrong names (At one point resulting in the player being told he needs to go talk to himself.) And then there's the bizarre word fusions. ("You slunched over and crushed the cake!")
• Magical Cannon Wars: It gets to the point that nobody even knows what's happening.
  Olivia: "Fight with me over the supremacy of the world. I was the country's Magical Girl Britannia."
  Akira: "And the child earlier, why fight to Nantes?"
  Olivia: "You know I'm a law of this world."
  Akira: "I care not fight."
  Olivia: "Looking to win the all clear."
  Akira: "I thought out!"
• The intro of Magic Jony, an unlicensed/pirate original game by Nice Code Software found on various plug 'n play Famiclones:
  Because nutrition sucked by the huge, monsters, sor all the plants have shriving one. This atmosphere of peace has been destroyed. The green land is becoming to wasteland, and people's lives were also threaten by monsters. Till one day, a little hero called Jony has come up. He must defeat all these monsters by his magic flower.
• Neo Geo games are rather well known for having spotty English translations across the board, and Magician Lord is no exception. As just one example from Big Bad Gal Agiese's various taunts before every boss fight, his line from Stage 2 is the rather pessimistic "I'm destined just to die." The same line in the original Japanese is the much more threatening 『運命は決した。死あるのみ。』 ("Your fate has been decided. You will die.").
• The Genesis port of Master of Monsters got a lot of mispellings of all the creatures' names and the names of their summoners due to the U.S. export. Examples are: "Daimyou"^note Daimyo, "Marmaid"^note Mermaid, "Sirene"^note Siren, "Loc"^note Roc, "Pheonix"^note Phoenix, and "Griffen"^note Gryphon.
• The infamous Dr. Light/Right and Crash/Clash Man (and Cr/lash Bombs) mixups in Mega Man (Classic). The first of each pair is considered correct.
  • This is actually lampshaded in Mega Man Battle Network, where Lan's grandfather is named Tadashi Hikari—which is Japanese for "Right Light".
  • One of the manuals for a Mega Man game even used the translation Dr. Wright, which really would make the most English sense.
• And then there is the case of the Doc Robots in Mega Man 3... In Japanese, their name is a pun: "Dokuro" is the Japanese word for "skull" and "robotto" is the Japanese loanword for "robot", so what do you call a Skull Robot? Dokurobotto, which ended up translated as Doc Robot.
• The English localization of the Game Boy Advance version of Mega Man & Bass is chock-full of translation errors in the CD database, but the most memorable one by far is Dr. Light's "bad point" (a fault of his personality) being listed as "Douchie". No, the doctor has not taken a level in jerkass over the years - this is a result of a hasty transliteration/truncation of the Japanese term だまされやすい (damasa re yasui), which means "gullible" or "naive" (in reference to him being easily tricked into helping out Dr. Wily, his former colleague).
• In Mega Man 9, the cutscene after beating the eight Robot Masters shows Mega Man and company analyzing the memory of the last Robot Master that was defeated. In the Japanese version, Roll's line in the scene doesn't have any gender-specific pronouns to translate into English (as is common with the language), so the localization team took this into account by inserting male pronouns when appropriate. What they didn't take into account, however, is that this was the first Mega Man game to have a female Robot Master, so if Splash Woman was the last Robot Master defeated, Roll will still refer to her with male pronouns in the following cutscene.
• Mega Man 11 has a minor example in the robot database: Fuse Man ended up with a pet rabbit in the English translation instead of a pet eel because somebody mixed up the words ウサギ (usagi, rabbit) and ウナギ (unagi, eel).
• The ROM Hack Rockman 4 Minus ∞, being made by the Japanese PureSabe, has a decent amount of these. He even admits his terrible English in the readme file. Generally, it doesn't get too bad, but we end up with a few gems.
  Kalinka: (referring to an upgrade) I suppose I put it on the doggy. ...All OK.
  Dr. Light: W... what you said?! No joking, Rock!
• The popular song Airman ga Taosenai translates as "I Can't Beat Airman." Unfortunately, thanks to a blind idiot translation, many YouTubers vehemently insist that it's "Airman will not be defeated." The reason is that "taosenai" is, in this case, clearly meant to be the negative potential conjugation of "defeat" (i.e. "cannot defeat"), but can also be the negative passive conjugation (i.e. "is not defeated"). Both make grammatical sense, but the former describes what the frikkin' song is about.
• Mega Man Battle Network 3 features a new chip known as "Prominence" in the Japanese version. Since it allows MegaMan.EXE to create a large plume of fire, it's a reference to solar prominence — the plasma that jets out of the sun's surface. The English version ended up going with a different translation of "prominence", writing it as "StandOut".
• Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon introduce a class of bad guys that should have been translated as HeelNavi... instead the player was faced with HealNavis. This was especially funny because unlike the original name, which would've been Exactly What It Says on the Tin, the name was in no way appropriate to their appearance; HealNavis are big bruisers with spiky armor. Beware the medics... Even a mention of the term "heel" on its own, as in referring to the part of the foot, is mistranslated as "heal".
  • From the same game, the infamous "What a polite young man she was."
    • Mega Man, is the jack out now!
    • There are so many electronic store!
    • Leg's go, Mega Man!
    • Want to saver you progress?
    • It's Phone!
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5 Team Colonel And Team Protoman, while not as bad with translation, had some rather amusing bits, such as Lan asking Mister Famous "What am I, Mister Famous, doing here?"
    • The DS version is even worse than the GBA version (somehow). With the chip trader offering to "Bigin Trading", and lines like "Be areful Lan." and "I'm on flames!"
  • Also the infamous "Load Chaud" from the first game.
  • There are also amusing inconsistencies with virus names; the most glaring of these is the Metool virus being labelled as "Mettaur".
  • Mega Man Network Transmission, the Gamecube adaptation of the Battle Network series, has a few of these. Most notably, "the professor is now cooling his heals in jail." Evidently, every competent translator at Capcom USA decided to take 2003 off.
• The Mega Man X series:
  • Three enemies in Mega Man X2 are the X-Hunters (Counter Hunters in Japan), with Agile as the only translation survivor. "Sagesse" (wisdom) has been mistranslated to "Serges." "Violent" without its final T looks too similar to "Violin," which is dangerously misleading.
  • In Mega Man X5, X apologizes to Squid Adler/Volt Kraken for the death of "Octopardo", and nobody knew who the hell that was^note It was supposed to be Octopuld, referring to Launcher Octopuld, Launch Octopus's name in Japanese. Too bad nobody told the translators they changed it for the first game. This was fixed in the Legacy Collection re-release.
    • X5's translation also mentions the "Reploid Air Force", a mistranslation of "Repliforce", the antagonists of the previous game. The Legacy Collection release fixed this as well.
  • Because the translation for Mega Man X6 was rushed out the door five days after its Japanese release, this game is full of these: for example, it wants to know if you want to "Overwright" your save...
    • X6 also gave us the shark Maverick, known as Metal Shark Prayer in Japanese (since as a necromancer, he presumably "prays" to revive deceased Mavericks), but Japanese Ranguage complications rendered it as "Metal Shark Player".
  • Mega Man X8 had one boss's name written in the manuals and in dialogue as "Gigavolt Man-O-War". On the "boss display" screen when you selected his stage, it displayed the name as "GIGABOLT MAN-O-WAR". Most likely due to the B/V confusion in Japanese transliteration of English words.
• The very first boss in Mega Man Xtreme is Vile... or as he's called in-game, Vava, because the localization used his Japanese name instead of his English name.
• The manual for Mega Man Xtreme 2 seems to misspell the names of the villains and Iris, being translated correctly in the actual game. This isn't as big of a blunder for the villains Gareth (Garess) and Berkana (Belkana) but given that X4 came out several years before this, you would figure they'd know how Iris is spelled. Instead, her name is spelled as 'Aillis.'
• As for Mega Man Xtreme 2 itself, thanks to the B/V conflict in Japanese, the game's intro brings us not to the "Reploid Research Laboratory", but the "Reploid Research Lavatory".
• Metal Gear:
  • While the NES translation of Metal Gear often hinged on So Bad, It's Good, with infamous lines such as "The truck have started to move!" and "I feel asleep!", it was not immune to downright bizarre mistakes as well. A particularly noteworthy example is a codec call where Big Boss tells Snake that he'll need the bomb blast suit to withstand "window barriers". There are no "window barriers" in the game, but there definitely are wind barriers, a result of the Japanese pronunciation of the English word "wind" (uindo) being pronounced very similarly to "window" (uuindo).
  • Snake's Revenge, the non-canonical NES sequel to the first Metal Gear, has quite a bad translation for a game supposedly made for the American market in mind. One instance has a three-man sub-boss team telling Snake that they've prepared "three graves" for him, while another instance has a dying ally telling Snake that they have "found out that Jennifer is a spy" (though its obvious what he meant was that Jennifer was an inside agent whose cover was just blown, the line seems to imply that she was actually a spy working for the enemy when that's not even the case at all). One plot twist involves another of Snake's allies being an enemy spy in disguise, but it's easy to see it coming when he gives such cleverly crafted misdirections like "there are no enemies in that car" and "there are no traps in that car".
  • Metal Gear Solid: When calling Otacon while fighting REX, Otacon will give some history on some of its weapons, including the railgun. During his explanation of the rail gun, he mentions that it was created by a joint venture between ArmsTech Incorporated and Rivermore National Labs. The Japanese version actually referred to the second group as Livermore National Labs, as in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as in the weapons research and development lab in Livermore, California. This issue was corrected in the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database. This is further confirmed by the mention of the Nova Laser project and NIF ^note While NIF is incorrectly referred to as a laser, NIF is a fusion based test device that does use a high powered laser, both of them based in Livermore National Laboratory.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was generally really well handled, but the most egregious mistake is the parrot chanting the horoscope 'Venus in Cancer'. The original line was something like 'The Venusian crab!' (a reference to the Venusian from It Conquered the World), and was supposed to cast Emma as a b-movie geek (in contrast to her brother's anime Otakudom). Makes even less sense when in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Para-Medic jokes that the mask makes Snake look like a Venusian - "not the crab kind, the other kind".
• Metroid:
  • The Maru Mari and Varia. "Maru Mari" literally translates as "rolling into a ball"", and, of course, later became "Morph Ball". The "Varia" (suit) was originally meant to be called the Barrier Suit (since it reduces the damage you take, and in later games, protects you from extreme temperatures). However, the name Varia caught on and has been used ever since.
  • The obligatory Engrish ending screen: "Great!! You fulfiled your mission. It will revive peace in {the} space. But, it may be invaded by the other Metroid. Pray for a true peace in {the} space!"
  • The opening text scroll of the original game has a much better translation than the ending due to being written in Japanese originally, but it makes the weird decision to localize 機械生命体 (kikai seimeitai, "mechanical life-form", referring to Mother Brain) as "mechanical life vein."
  • The name "Chozo", the birdman race featured throughout the Metroid series, came from an abbreviation of Chōjin no Zō ^note 鳥人の像 or "birdman statue". Thus, the name originally referred to the bird-like statues that appeared in the games, and not the actual birdman race itself that they represented. When Nintendo Power's Super Metroid tie-in comic gave Samus her origin story, the name "Chozo" was used to refer to the birdman people that raised her and every subsequent game afterward would follow suit. Interestingly, the Chozo statues in Super Metroid were called "Torizo", which is another way of reading the characters for "bird statue" or "Chozo" in Japanese. Prima Games's two-in-one Strategy Guide for Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion has an even more bizzare translation of the phrase. It should be noted that "Zō" can also be translated to the word "elephant" with the similar kanji 象, because what should be properly localized to "Chozo Statue" is inexplicably and nonsensically rendered as "Elephant Bird".
• Director Yoshio Sakamoto supervised the localization of Metroid: Other M himself, and with him not being a native English speaker, the result was an English script littered with badly-rewritten artifacts of the original Japanese, including the tell-tale use of "a certain" from implicit-subject languages like Japanese, and some of the awkward phrasing mocked under Memetic Mutation, as noted by Extra Credits in part of their postmortem on the game. In addition, an in-depth comparison of the English and Japanese scripts done a decade later found that several ideas were lost in translation, thanks to the above issues and a large amount of hyperbole and metaphor being used. Of particular note is Samus remarking that, while she didn't hate Adam for it, she was annoyed over being nicknamed "Lady", since it made her feel "weak" at the time: the exact opposite of the feelings of happiness the name is said to give her in the English translation.
• The English-language manual of Mighty Bomb Jack describes what the three Power-Up levels do under the oddly phrased heading "amplified of mighty power." The enemies' names and descriptions are also bizarrely translated, e.g. "Heel" (a flying skull): "It narrates the pyramid legend weirdly, 'Weird! Weird!'"
• Mondo Medicals has many deliberate examples of very awkward English. "CANCER?! DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT A CANCER IS?! CANCER IS A SMALL PIECE OF DEATH THAT SLOWLY TAKES OVER A BODY!"
• All Monster Rancher games, and sometimes even the anime, dip into this, but it really shines in the GBC Monster Rancher Battle Card Game.
• Mystery Quest: "Hao can not swim", showing his Super Drowning Skills.
• Ninja Gaiden Arcade is full of badly done English signs and labels such as "IceCeCrem", "Esso Gus", "Caca {Cola}", "Sele"(sale?), "Loin Dry Clehn", "Peps(i)", "Beer Gaden", etc. Some of these, as you can see, also work as Bland-Name Product, intentionally or not.
• Opoona's translation, while... servicable, does have several notable and bizarre errors. One particular art piece in the game has its name rendered as Octopus Ballet, Octopus Bounce, and Taco Volley. The "taco" part probably comes from the Japanese word for octopus ("tako"), but the rest is up for debate. The game also does things like constantly misspell character's names, and there are some confusing item names as well (like the "Pet Gauge," which is actually a Pet Cage).
• Castle Shikigami 2 is terrible about this. Even though you can still enjoy the game without understanding anything that is being said, backstory and references to the prequel are impossible to understand because of the vague translations. There are several characters whose stories are so badly translated that you have no idea why they're even in the story (even the next to final boss has a backstory that makes almost no sense due to the translation). And then there's the ingame dialog. Keep in mind this isn't even some of the worst dialog in the game.
  • I like girls...but now, it's about justice.
• Persona, again.
  • Some of the name changes of the Personae and demons in the game were a result of this — they just directly romanized or approximately romanized the name of the Demon/Persona, without bothering to check if it was referencing anything — which, this being a Shin Megami Tensei spinoff, it was virtually every time. Among others, this leads to Armati becoming Almighty, Scylla becoming Sucula, and at the "what were they thinking?" end, Skuld becoming Skragg.
• The Phantasy Star games were full of these.
  • A gem from the second game comes in Paseo after Nei dies, where talking to an old man results in him telling you: "Brain. This caused the people's mind to weaken. The trap also leads Algo to destruction. I don't know who made the trap, or why. There is a Neisword in the box. When you pick it up, it will rescue you from the evil side."
  • In the English version, Alys of Phantasy Star IV is nicknamed the "Eight Stroke Sword", and she hates the name with a passion and scolds people for using it; but some players wondered why she hates having such a cool name. In the Japanese version, she was called "Yatsuzaki Lyla", which would be more accurately translated as "Lyla the Disemboweler" or "Rip-Their-Guts-Out Lyla".
  • Also in IV, one of the Musk Cats is utterly convinced that the old man's shuttlecock is the most beautiful thing ever. In the original, he's talking about Myau's wings.
  • The opening cinematic of Phantasy Star I. The guards beat the heroine's brother to death and make an example out of him, telling the curious onlookers "Do not sniff around in Lassic's affairs!". In the Brazilian-Portuguese version, the translators took the less innocent meaning of the word and this turned into "Não se intrometa nos romances de Lassic!", which makes the dramatic scene about the evil overlord's grip on the population look like a paparazzi was too annoying during his job.
  • The first game also had oddities like a "first food shop" (obviously meant to be "fast food") and an enemy resembling an eyeball with wings being referred to as an "Owl Bear".
  • Phantasy Star Zero's blue Ar Rappies and pink Rab Rappies seem to be a bad translation, considering the fact, that in Phantasy Star Online, the blue Rappies were called "Al Rappy" (jap. アル・ラッピ aru rappi) while the pink ones were calles "Love Rappy" (jap.ラブ・ラッピ rabu rappi). As the "u's" at the end of English words, written in katakana, are in the most cases not pronounced (i.e. Bus (Jap. バス basu)), it seems that the person did simply apply this rule.
• The intro to the arcade game Pirates:
  "Map of the treasure is in pirates' power. Help me to find it. It might be dangerous. Be strong and be brave. Good luck."
• 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. Pokémon Sword and Shield changes Pound's name to "Klaps", meaning slap.
  • The attack Judgment was translated in Germany to "Urteilskraft", either meaning "power of judgment" or "reasoning powers". Would have avoided confusion if they had chosen "Urteil" (literal translation of judgment).
  • 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. Its name was changed to "Erfassen" in Sword and Shield.
  • In Spanish translation: the hooked [name of Pokémon] (when you fish) was translated to el malvado [name of Pokémon], which means the evil [name of Pokémon] (hooked, yeah, but not like that). And the move Counter is translated as contador, which is, in fact, a counter, one which counts things. It was corrected in Generation VI to Contraataque. The Italian version makes the same error: Counter is translated as Contatore. It was finally corrected in Generation VI, where it was replaced with Contrattacco. Polish also made the same mistake: The move is translated as Liczydło, which means "abacus".
  • Also in Spanish, the move Return (as in "give something in return") was translated as Retroceso (something like step back or rewind). Retorno could have been a better translation. The Generation VI games corrected it to Retribución (Retribution), which is much more fitting. This is also a mild case for the English translation of the move itself, as the Japanese Ongaeshi, while literally meaning "Return Favour", has the more idiomatic translation of "Payback" or "Repayment".
  • The English translation itself had some problems with the attack 'Splash', which originally meant something closer to 'Hop'. In the original games, this wasn't any big deal (the only thing that could learn the move was the fish Pokémon Magikarp), but cue confusion in Generation II when Hoppip got the move despite no apparent connection to water. Not helped by the fact that the animation in Generations IV and V shows water splashing when it's used. This is a matter of the word having two different meanings, but only in the original language.
  • The English translation also had problems with attacks that were actually in English in the first place: for example, 'Speed Star' was translated as Swift, despite the fact that it has stars all over the place, but Sky Attack is also worth mentioning, since due to it being translated the way it was, the user just glows randomly in its first turn. That's because its original name was 'God Bird' (likely changed due to Nintendo of America not wanting religious references in its games at first).
  • 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-type move for the pun, 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.
  • The move Thunder was also badly translated. The original Japanese name (Kaminari) can translate as both "thunder" and "lightning", and in this case was referring to a lightning strike. Same with Thunder Punch, though in that case they just wouldn't have had enough letters to call it "Lightning Punch". Its possible that the translators decided on Thunder to keep it consistent with Thunder Punch.
  • Another case of a move's original name having a double meaning that was ruined in translation due to the lack of an equivalent for both meanings is the move Curse, which has two different effects. When Ghost-type Pokémon use it, it's a Cast from Hit Points move that curses the target, but if a non-Ghost-type uses it, it lowers the user's Speed while raising its Attack and Defense. This is because the original name for the move is Noroi, which can translate as either "Curse" or "Slow", so the joke is that it's actually both - Ghosts interpret it as Curse and non-Ghosts interpret it as Slow.
  • Another case of a Chinese bootlegger releasing a pirated game with a questionable English translation: Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal. When the character picked up an item such as a Potion, the text would display "GOLD!DRUG BAG FUCK". This might be the same reason that word shows up in the bootleg subtitles of Revenge of the Sith: the Chinese word for "to do" (干 gàn) is slang for sexual intercourse, just like its English equivalent. There are thousands of other errors: Pokémon are referred to as "elves", and the Pokémon names are very odd. While some sort of make sense (Venusaur is called "FLOWE[r]" and Spearow is "BIRD") others...well, Venonat is called "CORN"^note likely from its Japanese name of Kongpang, and that's far from the worst. To build on the surrealism, the "translation" also uses very uncommon and out-of-context English words that not even most native English speakers would be able to comprehend, such as "X HAVE A PILLORY" (a synonym for the stocks) when describing a Pokémon being switched out.
  • The English translation of HeartGold and SoulSilver, while for the most part good, had some lines that were... fairly awkward, to say the least. "And this place that you can have such fun... is called the Battle Frontier!"
  • This trope is invoked with Pokémon Blue: Google Translate Edition, an homage to Vietnamese Crystal and other bootlegs.
  • The Premier Ball was probably meant to be called a "Premium Ball", since you get one for free each time you buy ten or more Poké Balls. The confusion stems from the Japanese word プレミア literally translating to "premier", but also being a contraction of プレミアム "premium".
  • In the original Gold/Silver and Crystal, the intact tower in Ecruteak City is called the Tin Tower. (Corrected as Bell Tower in the remakes.)
  • The Chinese translation takes the ability "Fur Coat" (as in, a covering of fur on an animal) and translates it as "毛皮大衣", which is a garment one would wear on a cold day.
  • "Struggle Bug" is an incomprehensibly-named attack which, going by its animation, is supposed to involve summoning some bugs to attack the opponent. The direct translation is "Insect Opposition," so apparently they just reworded that phrase without thinking about what it meant. Something like "Bug Barrage" would have been more descriptive.
• Early released games of the European-based visual novel Publisher MangaGamer is full of this. It's so bad that one of their games, namely Edelweiss, had to be re-released with only minor grammar fixes. Not that it does any help, because the game is still gibberish after that. But on the other hand, when you actually figured out some lines, it's worth some good laughs.
  • Edelweiss is also notable for not translating significant portions of dialogue, presumably because they found it too complicated, and not germane to the "sex". Anytime when the protagonist is saying, "I don't know what he's saying..." — it's perfectly understandable, if complicated Japanese.
  • They tried to bribe their only available English-speaking contact, to retranslate/spellcheck. He hasn't gotten back to them yet.
    • They eventually did do a full retranslation of the game, released as a free patch and done by a native English-speaker.
  • As admitted in a later interview, early games were translated in-house by Japanese employees (not translators) whose grip of English was... questionable, and there was no script editing done after that. This becomes jarringly obvious in Edelweiss where you can notice that different routes were translated by different people with different level of English proficiency, leading to a single term (Homunculus) being translated/transliterated differently in every route.
  • "Either they mustervate or they become lilly"
  • Admittedly, among their 3 opening titles, 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.
  • Speaking of MangaGamer, another of their games, Kira☆Kira got pretty close to this, being translated too literally and resulting in a unnecessarily long wordy script. The other English version on iPhone? Even worse.
    • Minor example from Kira☆Kira but it's one that could annoy fans of punk rock because of the way that music references are translated. Sex Pistols? Alright. The Ramones? Yeah. Now... The Clash? That's "The Crash" for ya. The frontman for Sex Pistols is also called "Johnny Lotten" and there is a scene where Kirari sings White Riot but the text shows "Why... I want to..." (White Riot, I wanna riot!). These errors are products of bad katakana interpretation. (However, that's excusable, since you wouldn't expect translators to have knowledge of the punk subculture.)
• From the epilogue of the Original R-Type: "THE EVIL BYDO EMPIRE WAS ANNIHILATED TO NEVER SCARE PEOPLE AGAIN." R-Type II has "THE BYDO EMPIRE WHICE WAS ATTEMPTING TO EXPAND ITS TERRITORY..." and "MANY PLANETS WERE INVADED BY THE EVIL EMPIRE AND TURNED INTO DEATH STARS..."
  • The original's ending text also called the Bydo the Byde, even though the title screen got the name right.
• Deliberately pointed out by the translators of Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure: "Welcome to the town of Whitesnow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow. * Note: this is what happens when you do a direct translation."
• The Samurai Shodown games are full of this. All of the games in the series suffer in some way. One rather unusual example in the second game looks like an exception, when Cham Cham is regarding the SNK Boss right after she's declared her intent to 'eat, eat you all': 'Shit! You really make me mad!'
  • Samurai Shodown IV is always happy to declare "victoly!"
  • The referee's statement after anyone's second fight in 2 is "ki ga warui" (meaning, roughly, "something's not right" or "something strange is happening"). It was translated literally into English, into the immensely quoteworthy "Horrible atmosphere."
• Secret of the Stars had a particularly bad one, such as translating "Kraken" as "Clarken". Some quotes from the game:
  "Whew! Studying math gave me a rash."
  "What? You're so anything. Go to the circus now."
  "I am just your everyday normal cat! Not!"
• SEED: Rise of Darkness, an iPhone game. Half the place names are wrong on the map graphic, the first jester you meet seems to be named both "Johnny" and "Zani", at the same time, and one NPC seems to be referring to a place that doesn't exist. How do you expect me to get your compass fixed if you want me to go to a nonexistent place?
• Speaking of Shadow Hearts, the third installment, From the New World, features several enemies lifted directly (though mostly In Name Only) from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Apparently the game's Lovecraft Lite atmosphere and the presence of Lovecraft himself as a character weren't enough to make the translators double-check a few of them. Sure, it's easy enough to mistranslate "byakee" as "byarkee," but when Shub Niggurath is translated as "Jeb Niglas", anyone familiar with the source material can't help but Face Palm.
• Cave is well-known for doing this to Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE. The most known examples being how the chain expertise "Regal Presence" turned into "Retaliation" and, later, "Alchemy" turned into "Craftsmanship".
  • The skills from the "Gun Knowledge" expertise, originally gratuitous English mixed with Italian, have been translated into English with Spanish in their names ("Ganmasutari QUATTRO" became "Gun Mastery Cuatro", for example). It doesn't help that the Italian part of the name is on the icon of said skills.
  • One of the main NPC of the story, Snakeman, is also very well known for speaking in Engrish.
  • Some skills were translated inaccurately (such as Megidolaon becoming Megidoraon, Ziodyne becoming Ziondyne, and Mahama becoming Manma), but that's more a case of not doing the research than wrong translation.
  • There are lots of items that have some mistranslations, but some of them are just weird, such as the "Medical Glove", which isn't a glove, but a dress!
  • And then we have inconsistencies with enemy names, such as "Hua Po" becoming "Hao Pao" in the Shibuya Quartz (Gold) dungeon.
• The Shining Force series is full of these. It gives us quotes such as: "I know you want me to be die!" and "Why did you kill sir Howel? How can you be so mean?"
  • "<player name> recieved <item>!"
• In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne there’s an odd case through the fanbase side of things, the ever popular common Boss Battle theme has been titled by several fan uploads as Fierce Battle for years despite the soundtrack never having an official english release back then, its official Japanese name is 強制戦闘 (Kyousei Sentou) which means Forced Battle, yet the "Fierce Battle" mistranslation was quite spread out.
• Skyblazer was loaded with WTF-caliber translations, but the one that stands out is that the word "well" was consistently rendered as "tuell". Comes close to qualifying for Translation Train Wreck.
  • The European version of the game corrected most of the numerous typos, although the script still ended up being pretty awkward.
• Yogui used Google Translate for the romanized Japanese level titles in World 3 of Something Else. Horikawa Otane was able to spot the grammatical flaws in the level titles.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story translates a monster supposed to be named "Scylla" as "Sukula", and at least one or two Tales games mistranslate "Stirge", a bat-like enemy, as "Stage".
• "Get lose, you can't compare with my powers!" (M Bison in the arcade version of Street Fighter II).
  • There was also the matter of "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance", which spawned an Urban Legend of Zelda, which gave rise to some Ascended Fanon.
  • Despite not having location tests in English-speaking countries, the game's location test ending screen was left in and translated...poorly◊. The fact that it still uses "Vega" to refer to the game's Final Boss rather than the claw and mask-wearing Spaniard is just the icing on the cake.
  • One of several NES bootlegs of the game was actually better than the Porting Disaster you'd expect, but the ending text that you get for each character after defeating "Viga" (M. Bison) more than makes up for it:
    Ryu: Ryu's desire is to be a competent wrestler. He lives a roaming trip for the present. Hi is still not a competent wrestler. He has no setting place and not job. All of his property are a suit of Kong-Fu clothes and a ribbon which is tied on his head. Whatever the season and weather, he always wears a suit of Kong-Fu clothes walki ng alone on his road. Everyone who meet him would think so, "Where does this guy come form?"
    Chun-Li: Chun-Li is a Chinese, probably she is the first female wrestler in the game history. She took a trip around the world to look for her father who was a government official of checking the poisonous drugs. She inherited the willing of her father to be a police. In the last time of searching in to a matter she discovered that there was a great criminal group Kaderu connecting with the disappearance of her father.
    Guile: Guile was an unamibitiousness, but he left his wife and child to take his revenge. Therefore, he could be regarded as an unusual person. Guile's wife had to make the artificial flowers and some works from the factories for a livelihood. She was considerate of her husband and kept the responsibility of family without comlaining. Recently Guile was responsible for family, he took care of family and concentrate his mind on playing a role as good father.
• The first Streets of Rage game had very minimal text, but the dialogue for the final boss had a big glaring error. When he makes you the offer to join his side, he says "Would you become my right-hand man?" If you deliberately try to get the bad ending, the final boss will say before making his offer "You're no ordinary man." He will refer to the player character as a man, even if the player is using Blaze, a female character.
• The first Suikoden game:
  Mathiu: Oh my god. All this killing... in front of a children.
  • It also almost seems to like referring to Mathiu, your strategist, as a surgeon or doctor.
    • Odessa referring to her uncle, Leon, as her father.
  • The ending theme is worse: it's supposed to be in Portuguese, but the guy who translated it apparently didn't actually know the language, so it ended up as gibberish that just sounds like Portuguese.
  • Stallion has a unique rune that gives him Super-Speed and doubles your overworld map speed; it's basically a souped-up version of the Holy Runes available in stores, which just double your normal walking speed. Fans usually call it the Godspeed Rune. The game calls it the "True Holy Rune," which is a problem because the True Runes are artifacts of world-shaking power that wars are fought over, and if some random elf had one it would be kind of a big deal. The mistake gets repeated in II when he shows up again.
  • At one point, Kirkis starts a conversation with, "After returning from Dwarves' Village" for no apparent reason. This is due to the localization team accidentally including a developer's note into the dialogue, resulting in Gremio saying Kirkis's actual line, Valeria saying Gremio's line, and so on until the actual final line in this dialogue chain (Kirkis expressing disbelief and telling the player to hurry) ended up being unused.
• Suikoden II is full of these as well, with plenty of name inconsistencies such as Bright Shield Rune/Shining Shield Rune, Black Sword Rune/Black Blade Rune, Jilia/Jilian Blight, Han/Hal Cunningham, etc.
  • Untranslated NPC dialogue and enemy names.
  • Your best friend's name was constantly flip-flopping between Joey/Joei/Jowy/Jowi. Let's just call him Joe.
    • And the "honking" and "talking" cats. (The former was supposed to be hissing, the latter meowing.)
    • The talking cat notably spawned a crack theory about it being the reincarnation of Teo Mcdohl due to it saying "So...nya" rather than "N...nya," or "Mr...mrow."
    • "Don't waist your money okay!"
  • The game also has entire sections of dialogue being spoken by the wrong character. Most notably at a peace conference late in the game it looks like one of your allies is betraying you since she is speaking lines meant for the enemy.
• Super Mario Bros. 3 has quite a few examples:
  • Unlocalized Japanese character names in the English versions: Peach's letter after completing World 2 mentions "Kuribo's shoe", when it should be "Goomba's shoe".^note A later cartridge revision fixed this, but Super Mario All-Stars reverted it. In the game's English manual, the cloud that allows the player to skip a level is referred to as "Jugem's Cloud" instead of "Lakitu's Cloud". Additionally, if the player returns to a world's castle after the airship has fled it, Toad pleads for you to get the wand back from "Little Koopa" instead of "the Koopaling".
  • One letter Princess Peach sends asks the player to retrieve the warp whistle in the darkness at the end of the third world, but this does NOT refer to anything in third act of the game. It's actually a secret in level 1-3.
• Super Mario Bros. is not immune. A great many of the English item names show that Square's publication arm utterly failed to do any research when localizing Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. To wit, the "NokNok Shell", a familiar green bouncy turtle shell: "Nokonoko" is the Japanese name for the race known in English as the Koopa Troopas. Likewise, several enemy spells are named Drain and Mega Drain, despite the fact that said spells are fireballs and lasers and they don't drain/absorb HP from the party. (The Japanese names for the spells are Kakyū (Fire Orb) and Lightsaber.)
  • The Lazy Shell was supposed to be called Heavy Troopa Shell, given it's the shell of the Heavy Troopa enemy. This is bizarre because the normal Troopa Shell weapon was translated correctly, though it may have been due to space limitations.
  • In addition, the Boo enemies you first find in the sewers are just ordinary Boos ("Teresa"), yet they're called "The Big Boo" in the English translation. (Big Boo in Japanese is "Atomic Teresa".)
  • Magikoopa's Psychopath thought is supposed to be him recognizing Mario as the baby from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, but is translated as "That's...my child?"
  • Most of these were fixed for the Switch remake such as the Drain "series" becoming Hot Shot, Fire Saber and Painspout and the Heal Shell becoming the Heel Shell. The Lazy Shell still keeps its name though.
  • Super Mario 64 DS translates King Boo's name as "Big Boo", which is very confusing considering the fact that there's already a Big Boo in the game.
  • Also, the Shroom Ridge track Mario Kart DS's kiosk prototype contains trucks with the word "FLESH" (fresh) labeled on the side. This was fixed for the final version, where they now properly say "fresh", but GCN Mushroom Bridge's icon still shows the "FLESH" sign.
  • Super Mario Land had this, in that it was pretty much machine translated from the Japanese version. The real reason half of the enemies have strange names such as 'Pakkun Flower'? It's because those are the Japanese versions of the names of enemies such as 'Piranha Plant'. More obvious when you consider the bosses and such like, with names that are very obvious English direct translations of the Japanese like 'Dragonzamasu' and 'Hiyoihoi'. The name of the first world, Birabuto Kingdom, was completely misread from the original Japanese by virtue of the translator confusing a handakuten for a dakuten. The intended name is Piraputo kingdom, a portmanteau of "pyramid" (piramido) and "Egypt" (Ejiputo). "Piraputo" or even "Pyrypt" would have been acceptable translations, but "Birabuto" is completely wrong. The Virtual Console manual calls the Chibibos "Goombos", Nokobons "Bombshell Koopas", Giras "Bullet Biffs" and Pakkun Flowers back to Piranha Plants. All the other things kept their original names.
  • The British English translations of Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) dub the track Neo Bowser City "Koopa City". Koopa is Bowser's Japanese name, and that is indeed the name used for the track in the Japanese version of the game, but to international audiences "Koopa" calls to mind an ordinary turtle mook that appears nowhere in the stage. You'd think the fact that the track has pictures of Bowser plastered everywhere would have tipped them off...
  • Paper Mario 64 has a minor character named Yakkey, an anthropomorphic key which, um, yaks. In a move that could only be the result of misinterpreting his name as a diminutive of "yak", the French translation of the game calls this character "Biquet", or "young goat/kid". The Spanish translators, meanwhile, straight-up skipped some bits of dialogue. Like the FFVII example above, this isn't Gratuitous English - entire conversations, plot-important ones at that, would be left in English for no good reason.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has an Underground Monkey in the Pit of 100 Trials called a Dark Lakitu, and the tattle entry for it misinterpreted "Paipo", the Japanese word for Spiny Egg, with the result that it is described as "throwing pipes at you".
• Super Smash Bros.
  • The French, German, Spanish, and Italian translations of Super Smash Bros. Melee seem to have been rushed (which is ironic given that this is the best-selling GameCube game ever), so while you'll get good translations for most of the simple text (fun fact: about 90% of the game's text is in the trophy descriptions), a lot of the larger text is still in English. So if you have little to no knowledge of English, good luck trying to figure out what all those signs mean or what the announcer is saying.
  • Subverted in Brawl, where the European translations have almost no English text, and each language has a different announcer.
  • In Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, Bowser Jr.'s Final Smash is named "Shadow Mario Paint", as in "Shadow Mario's paint". In the Italian version, it was translated as "Mario Paint Ombra", as in "The Evil Doppelgänger of Mario Paint". The correct translation would have been "Vernice Mario Ombra".
  • The British version of the Wii U game makes a particularly frustrating mistake regarding the name of a particular Dolled-Up Installment. In previous games, as well as the American English translation of the Wii U version, the Lip's Stick item was correctly identified as originating from Panel de Pon. In the British version, it is instead listed as coming from its international adaptation, Tetris Attack, which featured Yoshi's Island characters instead. The eponymous Lip never appeared in Tetris Attack at all.
• In The Ignition Factor, a firefighting game for the SNES, the fire chief says this when you inspect the map before starting a mission: "Put the castle together and push the button. And then you'll be able to reach it. I wish I could tell you more, but I have no clue what I'm talking about." It seems the translator had no clue either, since a correct translation would have been, "If you move the cursor to the place you're interested in and press the button, you can examine that area." The problem was that the translator misread "kaasoru" as "castle" instead of "cursor". The game seems to have plenty of other mistakes that are likely caused by not bothering to understand the context of the messages.
• The Genesis version (the only one to be translated) of Valis: The Fantasm Soldier. For example, "Get Fantasm Juely!", and "Welcome to fantasy world, Yuko". And Valis II for the TurboGrafx-16 CD has gems such as "I am the Red Salamander Zaruga, one of Roglas' 12 generals. Come warrior Valri, let's engage in combat." Also, Roglas (the Big Bad of the first game) is referred to as "the Roglas King" in the localizations, and his minions are collectively called the Roglas Army.
  • One of the games got translated as "Syd of Valis". It's supposed to be "SD Valis", the SD being short for Super-Deformed.
• The in-game dialogue in Valkyrie: Epic War/Valkyrie: Evolution is incomprehensible. "You play good people bitterly, sister first dismissed, let us go back home to take a group of maid serve you, oh" "Maid ah, or a group of good looking forward to it" "Miss Lv Here, you do not hurry worship" "Xiongheng brutal Riboud how to the small Lolita" "Although I am gentle and lovely outside, but my heart is very enthusiastic Oh" "Zhou Tai and Huang Gai skills simultaneously lit, will trigger the screen to the right of the button combination kill Oh, great power, with caution" "Heaven is dead Duang Duang yellow days when the legislature at the age of six decades Duang world down Duang Duang Duang!" "You still come quickly to help me destroy her, and I can not stand a little" "We refuel, off the faces of the children they can have our Big Joe (I heard the nurse group), and we later on have Naichi friends" "Zhang Yan people here! Who dares to go shopping with me? Sorry, but the lines are not the right! It should be, who would fight to the death with me?" "No I do not buy coupons" "I was The Devil Wears Prada, sister of the mace is not a vegetarian Oh" "Do you take us to Guaipao shijiazi dragon sister, come quickly pay out, we do have to go shopping shopping" "Machine Juji my legs numb, and finally down to relax the" "The original NPC Ma Chao is not a motorcycle, which my heart balance" "They said I was 'Little Joe on it,' is the most beautiful nanny, Yuan Fang, how do you see?" "This set are strange!"
• Valkyrie Profile has a pretty decent translation, possibly because the English voice cast needed something intelligible. But the message the game gives you when it's time to unleash your Limit Break is a real howler: "Technical arts energy charged, PURIFY WEIRD SOUL! Hurry up push button! Step on it!"
  • Interestingly, the word weird is derived from an ancient Nordic word, meaning something similar to fate. It may be a coincidence, but for a game so heavily inspired by Nordic myths to use the word weird like that, it might actually mean something. Of course, it would still be something of a mangled sentence.
  • Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria has its own example of this trope in the move "Nibelung Valesti". It sounds cool and all, but the move was actually supposed to be Nibelung Velocity. "Valesti", incidentally, is the Italian second person singular past historic form of "valere", meaning "to be worth", so "Nibelung Valesti" translates roughly as "You were worth of the Nibelungen".
    • This mistake originates in the original, and they were more or less required to keep it to maintain consistency.
• Parodied in Vega Strike — one of random lines for Rlaan when they are angry is:
  May you be ravaged by poor Hungarian-Rlaan dictionaries... computer! Reboot translation!
• Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune:
  • Dear God, almost every line that is longer than 3 words is wonkily translated. In fact, there are a few instances where not only is the translation is wrong, but the formatting is wrong. On one stage, there are 2 lines, both of which are very long and don't have linebreaks, causing each line to go all the way across and off the screen. This seems to have become less of a problem from Maximum Tune 4 onwards, but some typos and grammatical errors still exist in places.
  • In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3, you're treated to "SUDDEEN KILL" when you clear a 10 Opponent Outrun with an S. The same mistake is in DX; it was finally fixed in DX Plus.
  • In Maximum Tune 4 onwards, your reward for clearing Story Mode twice is the 10 Outrun Mode soundtrack. Or, according to the album jacket shown when you unlock this soundtrack: "Sound of Ten persons Pulling out Mode."◊
• Wild ARMs:
  • The first game received a pretty bad translation, with gems such as "Ray Line" instead of "Leyline". Another example is "Homonculus" being translated as "Holmcross". This one however was kept in the PS2 remake as fans felt the term had become emblematic of the series.
  • The sequel was just as bad due to the excessive use of Purple Prose. Among other things, it implied that Brad was gay and turned most of Liz dialogue (originally a mass of Japanese cultural references) resulting into gibberish, like "I don't care if it is poetry or the Emperor of Death. I'm in a hurry!".
• Wolf Team is loaded with this. Even the title screen has it! Enjoy the 5.1 Circle Sound while you use the EM-60, but have to reload four times to prevent overheat from over 200 shooting. Stupid interruption in the supply of ammo. Watch out for the Snake Attack, you never know when a Ghost Wolf will get behind you. They usually try when your Machine Gun is in installation or when you are trying to plant the bomb.
• World in Conflict. The second screenshot is obviously supposed to be HUD of a Soviet copter. The text in the right column is: "Method: seedpod of a weapon; auto piece of artillery; Sabo(?); ? of kidnaping". No wonder it was posted in a LJ community dedicated to the "Fake Russian" trope.
• The X Men arcade Beat 'em Up notoriously has Magneto unleash a sneak attack on the players while proclaiming "X-Men - WELCOME TO DIE!"
  • Which Deadpool, in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, actually adopts into his repertoire, just as "Magneto! Welcome to die!". Hopefully Konami will forgive Capcom for this...
  • Let's not forget Professor X's sage advice. Right before the final boss fight (after defeating a Magneto imposter), he proclaims: "Alas, that was Mystique, not Magneto! Magneto is in another place! Go, X-Men!" Especially odd when you realize "another place" means "this door, right here."
  • The Final Boss fight is a continuous stream of this sort of dialogue, from "I am Magneto, master of magnet!" to "KILL YOU!" Most definitely worth a quarter or ten.
  • For the Updated Re-release, Kyle Hebert and Mela Lee were going to record more natural dialogue but the dialogue was replaced by the original cheesy dialogue (though re-recorded) due to fans enjoying the original dialogue.
• Usually the localization jobs on the German-developed X-Universe series are pretty good, but the English version of the X-Encyclopedia has one particular page that is a mess. An excerpt:
  Together with Elena and representatives of the Goner Brennan can prove, really from as lost valid planet earth to come.
  • Based on context, one assumes the writer meant "Together with Elena and representatives of the Goner, Brennan can prove he really is from the lost planet Earth."
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dark Duel Stories for Game Boy Color had an... inconsistant English translation; several characters used their Japanese and English names inconsistently, some things using placeholder names (usually followed by "(?)" in the text), or in the case of the Millennium Items, using "Millennium" and "Thousand Years" interchangeably, sometimes in the same conversation. Some characters even had entirely different names than any other source, such as Yugi's grandfather being called "Trusdale" (an early working name, when the games were being localized before the show hit the US). Yugi's grandfather kept the Trusdale name for a few games before being gaining his name of Solomon.
  • World Championship 2007's Spanish translation is... peculiar at best. The translating team seemed unable to distinguish nouns from actual English words and just translated everything they could. This leads to absurd hilarity like Fenomenal Factura (Great Bill. In the economic meaning of bill).
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda's screwy translation actually severely increases the difficulty of the game.
    • A lot of the trial-and-error aspects of the game would have been averted if the messages had been rendered properly, and indeed Japanese speakers who played the Japanese version have traditionally cited the enemies as being the primary reason for the game's Nintendo Hard difficulty, rather than the difficulty of finding dungeon entrances and hidden treasures. That being said, there's one notable hint given by the old man in level 8 where he says "10th enemy has the bomb". The Japanese version has him give a hint about the Magical Key instead. However, the English hint about the bombs is actually true, but how you get bombs from a "10th" enemy isn't exactly explained. ^ExplanationIf you defeat 9 enemies without taking damage and then defeat the 10th enemy with a bomb, that enemy will always drop a bomb. It won't drop a bomb if it's not programmed to drop anything to begin with.
    • The localization removes the hint about the Silver's Arrow location. In the Japanese version, the old man in Level 8 says "look for the arrows in Death mountain," which was changed to "spectacle rock is an entrance to death." In fact, the hint in the localized version was originally given in level 7, which was changed to "there's a secret in the tip of the nose." Without the hint, they're not just harder to find - with no mention of them anywhere else, a lot of 80s kids probably spent a ton of time attacking Ganon and not knowing why nothing can keep him down, never having gotten that earlier hint that there are some arrows around here that are supposed to be important.
    • The game's intro text has this classic: "Many years ago, Prince Darkness Gannon stole one of the Triforce with Power." However, the intro text is the same in the Japanese version of the game. The people behind the English version just didn't bother to fix up the intro.
    • Even the famous and memetic line "It's a secret to everybody" would be more accurately translated as "Don't tell the others".
    • This actually significantly increased the difficulty of the games for English speakers, since a number of lines intended to reveal locations of important treasures or future dungeons got completely mangled, thereby leaving players with no clue where to go next. For example, a message intended to reveal the location of the Magic Key (which is pretty much required for completing the final dungeon due to the absurd number of locked doors) got rendered as "10th enemy has the bomb".
    • Interestingly enough, the replacement message is also factual, but infinitely more convoluted than the rest of the messages combined, as can be seen here. The short version: killing 10 enemies without getting hit and killing the 10th enemy with a bomb causes them to drop a bomb pickup that gives you 5 bombs, but you need to take a hit to get another bomb pickup after 10 kills. It's possible that the translator found the information from Nintendo Hotline's folders and decided to replace the message.
    • In the Japanese version, the old man in the first dungeon tells you that you need Rupees to use the arrows, which is a fairly helpful tip. What did it get translated into? "Eastmost penninsula is the secret", which to this day still confuses players. Fan-theories suggest it either refers to the Triforce piece at the end of the dungeon, or a secret Money-Making Game area in the northeast corner of the map. Either way, the translation is a garbled mess.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link:
    • Oddly enough, the infamous line "I AM ERROR.", though mistakenly assumed by many to be a case of "Blind Idiot" Translation, is actually entirely correct. It's another character who's called Bagu, a literal romanisation of the Japanese transliteration of "bug", that's the mistake. The joke was meant to be "Bug" and "Error", with the duo as part of a quest line in which the former tells you that the latter has some information you need.
    • Some non-Japanese fans who aren't aware of the above factoid believed that Error was meant to be Errol (as in Errol Flynn, known for swordplay in his movies) because of the Japanese Ranguage. This is impossible, since "error" (エラー erā) and "Errol" (エロール Erōru) are very distinct, which makes this a case of "Blind Idiot" Translation by the fans instead of the localisers.
    • Zelda II did have some examples of... unusual translation, though, particularly the classic "IF ALL ELSE FAILS USE FIRE." It means to use the Fire spell on armored enemies, but when just offered on its own - as it is - it becomes rather unintentionally hilarious and seems to be encouraging pyromania. (Note that the Japanese version has a different line here.)
    • Note that the original Japanese version of Zelda II has a lot of clunky lines too, due to having way too little space to fit way too much information into.
  • And then in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, there's a line near the end spoken by Vaati: "I will have no more of you interfering with of my plans!". In later copies and the Wii U Virtual Console re-release, this is fixed. This is one of the few that makes some sense; Vaati was originally a Minish teenager/young adult (it's hard to tell) who wouldn't have known much of the Hylian tongue in only about a week of being in the Hylian realm.
• Zero Wing: Whoever translated this game was obviously not very fluent in English, but if they were, we wouldn't have gotten the Memetic Mutation that is "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
  • For great justice!
  • Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb! (Which could be taken to mean "Somebody, set us up a bomb [to attack the enemy]!" as well as the intended meaning of "Somebody set us up a bomb [on our ship]!")
• The English release of Zoids Saga 2 (as Zoids Legacy) was about as blind idiot as it comes. Not just did it freely mix the names from the English dubs of the Zoids anime with their Japanese originals (so you had the American "Leena" alongside the Japanese "Ballard") but it was full of pure nonsense translations. For example, the description of the Gator Zoid read "Deform for recon". More interestingly, the Merda Zoid (one of many in the game not released in the US, and it had about four or five possible Romanizations) was renamed "Hellrunner", the name it was released under in the UK... in the '80s. To make the whole thing even more confusing, one of the lead translators on the staff was an active member of the Zoids fan community.
• From Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner:
  "The winner of the year was Hesperia Gales. In the final 30 seconds, Henry G trashed out from fieldout!"
  • This game was full of it. "It is a command which arose from the basis of a program." "The basis of a program, are you kidding?!"
    • "Dingo!"
• It's not uncommon to play a beat-'em-up or Fighting Game which features a character whose fighting style is listed as "martial arts". Examples include Axel Stone, Cody, Terry Bogard, Ralf and Clark, and Sarah Bryant to name a few. This is because in Japan, the English term "martial arts" is used as a loanword to refer to martial arts of western origin (such as American-style kickboxing or full-contact karate), in contrast to its use as a general term in English. That's why we often get characters whose martial art style is "martial arts".
• Possibly the ultimate repository of video game examples would be the Zany VG Quotes page, all complete with screenshot and (pithy) caption. Witness Romeo and Juliet built only with (slightly tweaked) video game quotes, you strange, unmasked fellows, and don't go to heaven!
  • "You strange, unmasked fellow. Don't go to heaven!" is actually a direct translation from the original Japanese version, and makes sense in context. EarthBound (1994) is a strange, strange game.
• Aeon Genesis's Fan Translation of Cave Story makes a few translation errors that mar an otherwise high-quality English script:
  • An early area known as クサムラ (草叢 kusamura, "grassy area") was translated as Grasstown (which is pronounced the same but would be spelled 草村). Nicalis's script, used in the Wii, DSiWare, and 3DS versions of the game, calls this same area "Bushlands".
  • A password that comes up late in the game is supposed to be the game's name spelled backwards (リタガノモツクード ritaganomo tsukuudo, an inverse of 洞窟物語 doukutsu monogatari). Aeon Genesis transliterates this as "Litagano Motscoud" (the lead translator admitted to being half-asleep at the time); Nicalis's translation caught this and uses "Yrots Evac".
• An infamous Snake clone found on several Chinese plug-and-play consoles has the incomprehensible title of Edacity Snakes, in what appears to be another instance of bootleggers with a subpar grasp of the English language making use of rare terms that even a lot of native speakers don't know about. What was intended was probably more along the lines of "Hungry Snakes".
• In-universe in Sonic Colors. Tails' uses a translator to speak to Yacker properly. Unfortunately (or for us, fortunately), it keeps screwing up the translation, leading to phrases like watering flowers with dances.
• Play any "localized" unlicensed Chinese mobile MMORPG, especially the monster-raising ones based on Pokémon. Awkward grammar, terms not matching with the official franchise(s) the game's based on, words used in the wrong context, and typos galore. While very few managed to improve (like Monster Manual, one of the many aliases for the infamous Pokéland Legends), there are still mistakes that can be easily noticeable by native speakers or players who are more familiar with the franchise(s) featured.
• Done intentionally in Control, to make Ahti come across 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).
• Believe it or not, an entire genre owes its name to this. In the 80's and early 90's, horror video games were simply filed under the "Action Game" or "Adventure Game" (pun not intended) umbrellas. However, the first Resident Evil's loading screen had an infamous mistranslation that said, "You are now entering the world of survival horror. Good luck." The term "survival horror" eventually caught on and became the accepted name for horror video games (never mind that "survival horror" sounds more like something you'd experience if you were camping in the middle of nowhere and ran out of food/water).
• Chants of Sennaar 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.

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