bad translation Archive

Wacky Words in Waku Waku Sweets

Waku Waku Sweets: Happy Sweets Making was released in the 3DS e-shop last month. Last week, someone on twitter shared this amazing mistake with us:

I’m supposed to butter the bread, not the pan. But “pan” (パン) is the Japanese word for “bread”, so there was an understandable mixup here. What happened is a lack of context. It makes perfect sense to butter a frying pan in a cooking game. It also makes sense for a cooking game to ask you to butter some bread. So the translators must have been translating from a script and didn’t have access to any other parts of the game. And then the QA team didn’t catch the mistake.

There are so many other mistakes in this game that I don’t think they had a QA team at all. Lots of grammar issues, stilted dialogue, unlocalized jokes, and incorrect pronouns. On the flip side, they use colloquialisms like “wanna”, “gonna”, “my bad”, and “you go girl”, which is pretty impressive. They also don’t try to turn the Japanese sweets into anything weird – they keep them as-is, which I think is great.

Expect to see more examples of translation errors from Waku Waku Sweets in future articles and books!

Showers of Localization

While in the shower last Thursday I suddenly decided that hey, maybe I should make a dedicated page for the bad translation galleries we have on the main site. So I moved things around and added a Zero Wing gallery at the start of the series, then tweeted out the new page link. I thought it’d be a popular series, but it seems I underestimated the power of bad translations:

I guess it makes a lot of sense though – we made our bad translation book largely to be an introduction to LoL as a whole, and the book immediately got super popular as soon as it was announced. In a way, this is the same deal, the bad translation galleries will hopefully entertain enough to introduce the LoL site to readers who never would’ve noticed it otherwise.

I accidentally skipped over gallery #6 so I’ll probably go back and fill it in with Breath of Fire 2 highlights. After that, there’s a lot of games that we could add to the bad translation series. Hopefully it’ll be a new, strong pillar for the site in the long run.

Jumping into Otome Games

With the surprising immediate success of our new Bad Translation Series yesterday, I wanted to quickly find more games we could throw up there. I remembered Alice in the Heart, an otome game (romance games aimed at girls) with one of the worst translations ever released. Unfortunately, that was a mobile game, and it’s no longer available to purchase anywhere, so in a sense it’s gone forever (one reason I dislike mobile games). So I went on a search to find other poorly-translated mobile otome games.

So far, my search has turned up nothing that comes remotely close to Alice in the Heart. At most, the games I found just need better editing. Here are some examples of my favorite mess-ups:


Yeah! Let’s post on hundreds of spider webs!


ehhhh… *insert doge meme parody here*


Besides the typo, I don’t like how the picture doesn’t match the description 🙁


hmmmmm……..

You Are Involved in a Crie

Yesterday I was looking through server logs and realized I should probably prevent image hotlinking on all the stuff in the LoL research section – with something like 50,000+ images on there it was really bogging stuff down. I decided at the last minute to provide a replacement pic, so I spent 15 seconds finding something. That something is this:

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the LoL 404 page you might enjoy it too: link

More Goofs from the Google Translate App

One of the best things about receiving packages from Japan is using the Google Translate phone app on the newspapers stuffed inside the boxes for padding. We got a game recently (which I still need to post about), and the app churned out some funny phrases on the newspapers:

We will never be free of eagles here at LoL.

Berseria is Hit by the Tales Curse

There’s a weird thing that happens with Tales of [fill in the blank] games. The main story is localized and voice-acted very well, but then you run into weird typos and strange wording in the “lesser text”. That’s what I call the stuff that NPCs might say to you, or the text in sidequests that aren’t necessary to complete the game. What you get is a game that seems like it was translated by two different companies – which is probably the case for Tales games.

I call it the Tales Curse.

Our buddy Ian Burch collected a bunch of examples of weird problems found in the sidequests near the end (or postgame?) of Tales of Berseria. I’ll be putting together a gallery of them all sometime, but here’s a look at one of my favorites from the bunch:

Ah, hmmmm. …. hmmm【・ヘ・?】

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sukky

We received some weird snacks from Japan this week. These Pocky boxes were a special Valentine’s Day promotion. The names are really weird:

I see what they were going for with “Papa” and “Mama” in there, but what is “Sukky” ?? Maybe 好き (suki)?

Here’s a candy with an unusual name:

I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks delicious!

And we found some funny English on a bag of garlic butter-flavored Cheetos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh no, Japan discovered comic sans…