It brings up an interesting question though - do we care about the outcome(the film being funny) or about being "correct". After all, Polish translation of Shakespeare doesn't change the meaning just to be more relatable to Poles. But then again, books like Harry Potter had plenty of changes to work in Polish(like the Sphinx's riddle being completely different in Polish just so it would make any sense - I would argue that one was kind of necessary though).
Likewise, when Baudelaire translated Edgar Poe, the translation literal as it would have been a failure to convey the poetry of the text.
Happens to me with the Simpsons.
It's still included because it's an iconic gag at this point. It's still a bad translation, but they know fans love it, and that's okay.
It would have been merely old-timey in Japanese, but in English it's rendered as centuries-old vernacular. "Spoony" ceased to be common language in the 19th century. "Bard" in the 18th, except in limited senses referencing archaic usage. No one is that old!
It's not wrong, just a little too far.
And as fenomas pointed out, it was exclaimed in a fit of violent rage. That is not the kind of thing one would bark out in a situation like that.
The reason why it's in every single FF4 translation is because it's such a ludicrously bad translation that it came out the other side and ended up funny. It wasn't intended to be a comedic scene, but it's become one in the minds of English-speaking fans.
(Also, Woolsey never translated FF4... he just did FF6, plus a TL of FF5 that never saw the light of day because Square pulled the plug on the US release on account of the game being "too complicated" for Americans. And while Woolsey is a master of dialogue who contributed a lot of iconic lines, his Japanese comprehension was actually pretty poor, and his FF6 introduced a number of plot holes that weren't in the JP version. The GBA translation is objectively better, and if you want both a good TL _and_ Woolsey's dialogue, there's a romhack out there called the Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition that combines the most iconic lines from Woolsey's script with a translation based on Legends of Localization's thorough analysis of the script.)
Also, I honestly thought Woolsey wrote that line because it was so his style. Apparently this is a common misconception.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/You_spoony_bard!
> Tellah
> original: きさま あの時の吟遊詩人！ きさまのせいでアンナは！
> literal: You! You're that damn bard! Because of you, Anna's...! (The word used for both instances of "you" is "kisama", the single rudest way to say "you" in Japanese. Because of its harshness, "kisama" is somewhat akin to "you bastard" or "you son of a bitch" in English.)
> SNES: You're the bard! You did this to her!
> Edward
> !?
> Tellah
> original: きさま よくも娘を・・・・
> literal: How dare you do this to my daughter... (Again, "kisama" is used for "you".)
> SNES: You swindler!
> Edward
> original: ちがうんです！
> literal: It's not like that!
> SNES: Please! Listen!
> Tellah
> original: なにがちがうと いうのだ！
> literal: How the hell could it not be like that!?
> SNES: You spoony bard!
I'm all for localizations that take liberties with the translation (see: the best parts of Woolsey's dialogue in FF6), but looking at this in context, it makes no sense. Woolsey's famous lines, like "Welcome to my barbecue!", belonged in context and didn't look out of place. This is just a non sequitor.
If you asked me to give a localized angry response to "Please! Listen!", I'd probably go with something like "I'm not listening to YOU!". Or if I wanted to be silly with it, "Why would I do that, bard-brain?" (OK, I'm not the best dialogue writer...).
Without her constant prodding at you, I think the game would lose both charm and player motivation. I'd imagine the pacing takes a hit as a result.
Here's one of my favorite examples of a bad translation to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFg6QOlV-EE
It's an NES game, but before I spoil it for you, try to figure out which one by letting the music play out.
There's a few specific cases of this that I quite like — the English translations of Asterix did a tremendous job of renaming all the characters in a way that's consistent with the spirit of the (idiomatically french) original jokes.
A personal favourite of mine, though, is a particular dialogue from Austin Powers[1] where the Portuguese subtitles found a joke that was just not there in the original. "It's a bit nutty" doesn't have a good idiomatic translation, so they instead translated it as "Tem muita borra" — Literally, "there's a lot of grounds in this", but "borra" can be read as either "grounds" or "poop".
1. https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/austin-powers-the-spy-wh...
And you can get translations of some of the comics into various German dialects as well.
On the contrary, I’ve found it’s something that most other Asian countries get really well, so the difficulty seems to mostly be limited to Japan.
That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult. Sometimes you're lucky and there's a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that's recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category. All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.
Having grown up with "spoony bard", "this guy are sick" and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren't a one-way street.