We've all been there: you get a new game that you've been dying to play, put it in, start it up, begin playing away, then it happens. Sometimes it happens right from the start, and other times you may play for quite some time before it strikes, but just like a severe case of nausea after hearing Justin Bieber sing, it's inevitable — bad translation.

From Samurai Showdown's "Victoly!", or the more infamous Zero Wing's "All your base are belong to us!" (you knew it was coming, don't act surprised), to a mistranslation or two in Harvest Moon...well, pretty much any Harvest Moon game, typos and mistranslations pop up all the time in games. And some of these are to be expected since the games are being translated between two languages that often have no exact translation for some of one another's words. Rewriting the dialogue while remaining faithful to the original content can be challenging to say the least.

Sometimes we fail to appreciate what localization teams do, and some even feel compelled to complain about it and accuse said teams of changing the meanings of the original texts — which isn't always the case — and demanding literal translations is asking for something you probably don't want as badly as you think. Some things, when translated directly (and properly), make little to no sense. For example: "What's up?" if translated literally would come out something like "What is your condition?" Say what? Are you saying I have a disease or something? Cram that in a dialogue box with a half dozen other awkwardly worded, directly translated lines, and you end up with a game that will require not only a game, system, and controller, but also a few aspirin by the time you finish the first half hour of that text heavy JRPG.


To showcase just how much work localizing a game is, as well as how much worse those occasional mistranslations could be, one translator (and I guess his wife?) set out to make a very special romhack of SNES classic, Final Fantasy IV.

Taking all of the Japanese text, he rigged up a program to run it through Google Translate. Then after a little formatting work, plenty of laughs, and learning to program SNES games just for the purpose of making this hack, he introduced the world to Funky Fantasy IV. Below is a video showcasing nearly two hours of gameplay, feel free to watch it, but be prepared to laugh quite a bit.

Also a fair warning: I have only watched half of this video, and it did contain two swear words (shall we say the "d" and "w" words?) in the game, and one of the people reading it swore once (a crass word for urinated). I don't suspect there will be any serious language in it, but I cannot guarantee it.





And to finish things off, let's look at a mini gallery of mistranslations that the localization teams missed.

 
Go ahead, push that start!


 
I don't even know what that's supposed to be


 
Technically monkeys can't game. Not well, anyway


 
Another one you had to know was coming



Is I? Is really I? Yay! A winner is really I!
Fun fact: while searching for this screenshot via Google, the result I turned up was from a user submitted screenshot on Vizzed.


 
Good for the mountain. No wonder it likes the mornings so much

Eirinn : Bad translations can be very, very funny sometimes, although they are extremely frustrating when they end up misleading you. Thanks for showing me Funky Fantasy IV...that's truly hilarious to listen to, which is why I'm listening to it right now. You also did a great job showing off some legitimate mistakes made by translators that aren't machines...you have to wonder how nobody caught those.

I knew I would like this post since I saw the truthful joke about Justin Bieber.

Now I don't blame that much the translators for doing such a bad job with Spanish dialogues in our games. If the English translation isn't actually accurate, then don't expect any translation made from it to be more accurate.

But yeah, misleading bad translations are so annoying. It's also true that sometimes they have to fit the space they're given, and for that they must play around with the words a bit, even if it results in a not-so-great translation. I've seen countless examples of this: videogames, manga, anime, movies, series... Basically anything I've seen dubbed in Spanish that wasn't originally written in Spanish.

By the way, not sure if it's the greatest typo of them all, but the correct name of the franchise is Samurai Shodown. I also thought it was Showdown, but when recently adding a few games of its series I opened my eyes to the (eye bleeding?) truth.

NovemberJoy : Thanks, I appreciate that! As for those translation errors I showed, a few I can understand due to the differences between English and Japanese sentence structure, such as the last Harvest Moon one about the mountain (since Japanese is notorious for the supposed "subjectless sentence" that can occur at times. By the way, it was supposed to say "The mountain air feels so good in the morning"), and the "A winner is you" since that would actually be proper sentence structure in Japanese. But the rest? Not so much. What the heck is a technical monkey? xD And that Ninjakun screenshot is just...wow. I have no clue how those last two made it past anyone. Lol



EX Palen : Yeah it'd been too long since I took a shot at him or Miley Cyrus, so I went with it.

Heh, translating from one language to another then from the second language to a third one is never going to turn out well. lol How much more when the second language's translation was poor at best?


Really? Wow, I never noticed that. I think what probably happened there is that the Japanese character (Romaji style) "O" is also spelled "Ow" and both ways it's pronounced like the English letter O. Seems logical to me that when translating it to English they failed to realize they needed the W in Showdown since it's spelled the same way in Japanese either way.
The same thing happened with Natsume in Harvest Moon 64 (if you look at the screenshot of HM64 that I posted in this article, you'll notice that it says "Natume" instead of "Natsume"). It has to do with the fact that the name なつめ (Natsume) contains the character つ which has two different Romaji spellings — Tu and Tsu.
Foreigners (non-Japanese) tend to prefer the Romaji spelling "Tsu" for the character つ, while Japanese tend to prefer to spell it "Tu". Both are proper and pronounced the same (since it's the same Japanese character), depending on which style of Romaji you use, and often Natsume is indeed spelled Natume, but the translators apparently were unaware that this particular company preferred it be spelled with the Romaji "Tsu" rather than the Romaji "Tu". So it's like... a typo that isn't exactly a typo? Yeah. I figure "Shodown" is probably the same situation. But that's just a guess. Cool find on your part though.

Eirinn : We're putting to good use our learning of Japanese, aren't we?

And well, talking about names, my ears still bleed whenever I remember that Vegetto was given the name Vegeku in Spanish (you know, fusion of Goku and Vegeta, we change the last syllable in Vegeta's name by the one of Goku's). Or in the game Ultimate Battle 22, where Recoome was literally translated to become Likum, in a failed guess of the translators that such is the way it's written in Japanese.

Just as English people have trouble understanding Japanese, Spanish people have trouble understanding English (I bet some would even confuse English and Japanese when not using characters ), so of course translations will never come out good. However, there's one thing that makes Spanish translations even worse: inconsistency. Long lasting franchises normally are never taken care of by the same company/dub team, so in one episode/game/movie you hear a name spelled one way and in the next one it's spelled differently.

Oh, and before I forget, what's wrong with Bimmy and Jimmy? I don't know what's going on with that, seems correct to me and surely more accurate than what the Spanish translation would be.

It is supposed to be Billy and Jimmy. Ah,the wonderful translations. Final Fantasy 7 had quite a few translation issues as well. That is because both languages have their own rules and structure. English is notorious for its exceptions,Japanese has its own exceptions and their use of honorifics. The -san,-sensei,-kun,etc...

EX Palen : Hai. xD Also I need to correct something I said in my previous post: o is also spelled wo, no ow. That typo might have been instead made because the w is silent and not represented in Japanese at all. Who knows.

I could understand that. I've been around Spanish so much (it's used quite a bit where I live) that I can at least tell what it is when I hear it, though I don't understand much of it. Still, I probably couldn't tell, say, Mandarin from Tagalog.
Yeah, I can understand why developers wouldn't want to edit all of the scenes and events in a game to create enough space for the different languages, but it would still be a pain for the gamer. At that point you're almost better off with English or Japanese voice acting and Spanish subtitles. I hate having to use subtitles, but it beats putting up with terrible translation...even if bad translation can be funny at times. lol

Given your post I'm thinking that might have been a joke, but I also wonder if you're seriously asking. Why must you be so unreadable?!? lol Just in case, it's supposed to be Billy and Jimmy. Again, I can't help but feel you're joking given what you said about the Spanish translation being even worse. xD


Oldschool777 : Surprising as it may seem, despite having grown up during that era of gaming I have never played Final Fantasy 7, or really any Final Fantasy after 2. Also surprising — to me at least — is that I've never heard about the translation issues. But yeah, the language structures alone explain a lot of the issues in translations. For example, like I mentioned earlier, the "A winner is you" makes perfect sense from a Japanese standpoint, but I still struggle with "I'm give up your appellation's. Technical Monkey". lol

Soldier- "But Physical Condition!"

Cecil- "Say whether everyone!
   The crystal's absolutely necessary because of
   the reflection of my Baron richness!"

Soldier- "Physical Condition demon is!"

Had me ROFL XD

I always thought of translations in games and other stuff the same way I thought about someone speaking broken English (or whatever their non-primary language may be). Someone once said, "Can you speak two+ languages fluently? No? Then you have no right to criticize someone for not being able to do it either " Not that things like this ever really bothered me personally to begin with.

Awesome article though. I always wondered about the work behind the scenes that went into translating stuff, and this is reassuring that most of the time they at least try to get it right lol.

Eirinn : I was totally serious. I'll even say more: I typed up that question with an innocent look in my face for being totally oblivious to what was going on.

Don't take this as scolding, but let me remind you that not everybody in here is used to see the English version/translation of things. Jokes that are very common for you are totally unknown for people like me. The same thing applies to foreign names, what you have as a common name is not that heard of elsewhere, so literally anything can be possible for someone not used to it.

There are still several jokes or expressions I don't understand, but after surfing the internet for years I've managed to reduce that number. Hell, those days where I didn't know what was about the "It's over 9000!!!" meme, simply because such scene in the Spanish and Catalan dubs isn't that much remembered or even used as a joke.

Mynamescox44 : Oh gosh, somehow I missed that despite watching the first hour, and that being at the beginning. That's priceless. xD Also loved Cid's(?) long dialogue bit later on. "I don't need cardio!"

Thanks. And yeah, this was pretty eye opening about the translation process.


EX Palen : No, I get that it could be confusing. I'm sure there are foreign names that I don't get right at all, Spanish included. In fact I often have to look up some names for articles I write because I can't spell them, let alone write them.

My apologies if I seemed to mock in any way. I was aware that you could very well be serious given that English is a second language for you, and as such attempted to answer you while being guarded in case you said "I was joking, man. Seriously?"

As for the meme you mentioned... I don't get it and English is my native tongue. lol I respect anyone who learns multiple languages because it's a big undertaking and requires serious dedication.