Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by Legogris on Monday November 11, 2019 @01:25AM
(#21502655)
One great example of that was how in some later Sims game (2 or 3), one of the actions possible on a bonsai tree in the Swedish version is "Katrinplommon", translated from "prune" - unfortunately, prune as in a dried plum, not the pruning of plants.
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Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by elygre on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:56AM
(#21503425)
Ah, nice! I guess all languages have legions of these. In Norway, dell sold computers with “brannkabel”, or “burn cable” [1].
[1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.
Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by toyg on Monday November 11, 2019 @06:11AM
(#21503816)
Considering the eventual hackability of Firewire, maybe the translation was prescient... you’re gonna get burnt by that cable!
Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by ejolto on Monday November 11, 2019 @07:27AM
(#21504262)
That makes no sense in context of Norwegian as "get burnt by" is an English idiom.
Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose.
Translation is difficult..
Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by jimnotgym on Monday November 11, 2019 @08:36AM
(#21504701)
Would it be normal to not translate these into languages that share the Latin alphabet at least?
Re:Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
by rags2riches on Monday November 11, 2019 @09:18AM
(#21504967)
In English most nouns can also be a verb, or vice versa, without the word changing at all. In some ways it is a feature, but it also leads to terrible outcomes like this. Words like "comment" and "reply" are often translated without context to the wrong class of word.