http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TranslationTrainWreck

Except that there is no elephant. note For some idea of how mangled this is: the original line is "He is like my brother."

Clyde Mandelin Breath of Fire II 's reputation for having a terrible translation is 100% warranted. In fact, it's so poor that it's fascinating. I'm sure that every translated game out there has its own little quirks, flaws, and mistakes, but Breath of Fire II has translation quirks, flaws, and mistakes of nearly every category possible."

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Sometimes translations are bad. And sometimes they pass bad at warp speed and crash headlong into the wall around the galaxy.

When a translation goes from odd word choices and stilted grammar that is still somewhat parseable into the realm of pure gibberish, you have a Translation Train Wreck. This is especially common in bootleg translations, where the "localization team" has little budget, less incentive, and may not even speak the language they're translating to. In the case of little or no knowledge of the target language, they may guess as to the meaning and structure of what they need or use a direct machine translation.

This often results in a Good Bad Translation, although these tend to apply more to generally okay translations with a few funny mistranslations.

A Sister Trope of "Blind Idiot" Translation. Often caused by Recursive Translation. May also include Translate the Loanwords, Too.

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Compare Gag Sub, a conscious choice usually made in fansubs and the subtitled counterpart of a Gag Dub.

Compare My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels, Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas and Intentional Engrish for Funny, where a fictional character manages to botch a language beyond all recognition. Also see Word-Salad Humor.

Examples:

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Chinese Fun Times (Anime and Manga)

Factory For Hand-Held Cooling Device (Fan Works)

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Horsepower Plastic (Films)

Ink Wood (Literature)

Man Boxes (Live-Action TV)

Child of the Interest (Merchandise)

Yu-Gi-Oh! CCG cards has some poor language, both official cards and fake ones. If you know where to look, you can buy 150 cards, including rare ones, for around $1.50. Unfortunately, the English on the cards is sub-part to say the least. You tend to get this all the time with counterfeit cards, which is surprising, considering most of the cards you'd get were translated to English anyway and the counterfeiters could have just copied the wording of the official cards. Winged Dragon of Ra might read "Magic Dragon with wings [Legend beast junta] Fairy is sing. Powerful strength is charging the world that maens all the life, ghost so much as skeleton." Let's not forget "Black cows magician" instead of "Magician of Black Chaos". A limb of Exodia is named "Sealed Leet Feet"? Even the OFFICIAL, real product is sometimes not spared from this. The famous Spell card Giant Trunade is literally supposed to be Giant Tornado . The translator mistook "torunedo" for the name of the tornado instead of the much more simple and sensible English word "tornado". Another card like this is Fushioh Richie, the "richie" part is supposed to be "Lich" (as in, the type of undead). And in other times you can tell that the translator just plain gives up and don't care anymore, thus intentionally making it a train wreck because he/she doesn't know at all what to put. We ends up literally having a card called Magical Something. The issue with Yu-Gi-Oh! translation in general, is that Japanese people LOVE puns and wordplay. One Japanese word can mean something else entirely different just because a kanji/kana character is replaced with another that sounds the same. The new "Sentouki" archetype is a good example of this, as the "Sentou" part means "battle", but is written with the character for "flashing sword". The TCG branch gave up again after seeing the wordplay and just call the archetype outside Japan "Sky Striker Ace".

As anyone who watches Stuart Ashen's bootleg knockoff stuff can probably tell you that this happens a lot with Shoddy Knockoff Products, whether on the product itself or in instructions for use. One violin toy was so badly translated note (in particular, with the names of famous violin creators Nicola Amati, Antonio Stradivari, and Giuseppe Guarneri, they translated the Chinese phonetic guides, resulting in "nicolas, Marty", "Antonio Stella bottom tile", and "ji plug pu · melon nai" being given as alternate names) that he ended up Corpsing uncontrollably and had to redo the episode; in said redo , he deemed the in-flap description as "the motherlode of Engrish."

can probably tell you that this happens a lot with Shoddy Knockoff Products, whether on the product itself or in instructions for use. One violin toy was so badly translated that he ended up Corpsing uncontrollably and had to redo the episode; in said redo , he deemed the in-flap description as "the motherlode of Engrish." The instructions (or rather, instnutions) for a particular Chinese top promise that it will "inspire children's thacghts" and "touch off the latent energy of scientific knowledge". It claims to be "diggicult" but still "enyoyable" and "Deep individually the friends welcome." "Deep" indeed.

Similarly, one Tumblr user purchased a sandwich slicer from China . Using method: Ready to slice sandwiches and stuffed, in the middle of two sandwiches into a stuffed, hundreds die in a sandwich press, take off the broken edge and die, a lovely delicious sandwich snack is ready.

I bought a sandwich cutter from China and I think the translation on the package is a bit off. It got real dark real fast.

. If you get one of those plastic puzzle balls, you'll find a small sheet of paper with instructions inside. The instructions refer to breaking the ball as "decomposing", and the section on how to break it reads "TO DECOMPOSE: EASILY THOUGH IT INTO THE FLOOR HAVE FUN." It only gets worse from there.

A Dragon Ball toy — a motorized figure with a propeller hung from a ceiling mount to look as if it's flying — has instructions that can only charitably be called English . Some examples: With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the under standing that screw no wield. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing, wield pre to begin wiping ceiling of bilge dasto. Prythee no sport with stingy or play asperity game. Winding finger have got bloodstream not wallk. Throagh of peril. Till the cowcomes home. Wield toys damage,burn-in prythee wind to a close wield. Not trust for tad batteries lest in advertent eat off. In the event of accident without loss of time plythee pillroller tuke order with. May pre house the seamy side volitation!!!

Ear Sex (Music)

The Engrish Eurobeat cover of TM Revolution's Hot Limit (We Drink Ritalin). As with most English-language covers of J-Pop. The major problem here is that the songs are often translated (and often literally) from Japanese and then given to groups that can barely speak English to perform. In this case, the group John Desire were Italian and had a barely passable grasp on the English language.

The Japanese vinyl of the single "Stranger In a Strange Land" by Iron Maiden has hilarious translation errors on the lyric sheet, especially the rap part of "The Sherriff of Huddersfield".

Japanese samba/pagode band Grupo Y-No became known on YouTube for their songs with lyrics supposed to be in Portuguese, contrasting the song's genre, originated in Brazil. Its songs, most notable "Querido Meu Amor" , note it should be "Meu Querido Amor" (my dear love), but the form it was "translated", it became something like "dear my love" has lyrics that apparently were translated from Japanese to Portuguese through an automatic translator. It's really funny to listen when you understand the language, but the band's songs is actually pretty catchy.

Lightning Box Satisfaction (Video Games)

Sunset Ink Running (Western Animation)

Top Is Table Doing Sex (Tabletop Games)

Warhammer 40,000: Official material often features exceptionally badly translated or declined Latin. This possibly moves into being a Justified Trope, as the various forms of the Imperial Language ("Gothic") may not actually be Latin ("High Gothic"), English ("Low Gothic") and Old English ("Proto-Gothic"), this is simply how Studio materials "render them" (or rather, to a standard Imperial citizen, High Gothic sounds the same way Latin does to a modern English speaker). Certainly, in the game world, Low Gothic is essentially a linguistic splodge of real life languages, principally Spanish, English, Hindi, and Mandarin, and "Proto-Gothic" is simply a different form of Gothic to the one that is in widespread use where the story is set (ten thousand years worth of background includes linguistic shifts, after all). It is ambiguous whether or not High Gothic is supposed to be Latin, however, and the Imperium still apparently uses the Latin alphabet. An in-universe one is the Space Wolves, whose tendency to put "wolf" into every proper noun is apparently caused by overzealous scribes butchering the translation from Fenrisian (a Slavic-ish language) to Low Gothic; for instance, "Jarl" becomes "Wolf Lord" and "Thane" becomes "Wolf Guard". "Space Wolves" isn't even their real chapter name, it's "Vlka Fenryka" (Wolves of Fenris). The Space Wolves themselves don't mind, as they deliberately play up their wolf-worshipping Barbarian Hero image in front of outsiders.

Vampire: The Masquerade has, among many others, the infamous Palla Grande, a Sabbat ceremony. They tried to translate "Grand Ball" (in the sense of a great and formal dance event) into Italian, but instead of "Ballo", the Italian world for a dance event, they took "Palla" the Italian word for "ball" in the sense of a spherical object.

Aquatic Weasel Mammal (Other)

Living Blood Real Long Time (Real Life)