Dutch television translates the English series with Dutch subtitles. Some are good. Others are not. Take the Glee subtitles for instance. As much as I love Glee, I hate the Dutch subtitles. They once translated Na'vi, as in the language of the blue, big people from Avatar, with the Dutch version of 'Naval language'.

This troper ''loves'' doing this with Babelfish, an online translator which is a most {{egregious}} example of this trope. For example:

"It is a good idea to redirect a plain title to the punctuated title. This is done by putting [ [ [ = redirect : ptitlexxxxxx = ] ] ] in the plain-titled article. The 'ptitle' is available at the end of the URL for the punctuated article." When put through Babelfish this becomes... "The fact that direction of clear title is changed into the title which is emphasized is profitable step. This is done by putting [ [ [ = change the direction: Ptitlexxxxxx of the article which can acquire clear title = ] ] ]. [[SugarWiki.FunnyMoments ' ptitle' Because of the article which is emphasized it can utilize in the edge of URL, but it is."

This troper's coworker had a tattoo of a kanji character he couldn't identify. After a little research, he realized that it was ''tomo'' ("friend" or "companion"), but it was ''reversed'', as if viewed in a mirror! (She already knew, and had plans to get it covered up.)

A boy in my brother's class got a tattoo as a senior. It was the Gaelic symbol for motherhood. He didn't believe them.

Similarily, someone this troper knows had gotten a tattoo of a Chinese character on her arm. During dinner at a Chinese restaurant, one of the waitresses stopped by our table to look at the tattoo and burst out laughing. The girl asked why was she laughing and the waitress informed her that the character translated into "Mailbox".

One of this editor's friends had "I wonder if my friend will understand this" auto-translated to Polish as his MSN handle; he did, despite the grammar being mangled beyond recognition.

This troper was once an employee of Blizzard's billing department, where we would often deal with Chinese gold farming agencies attempting to shut down other Chinese gold farming agencies. The letters were invariably translated through some babelfish program and as such, BlizzardEntertainment Company invariably translated into "Flying Snow Happy Funtime Building Place." We also got a letter which ended with the phrase "I hold your mother passionately." and we have no idea what they were trying to say (context was thanking us, so it definitely was not an insult, which was our first thought.)

In order to shut down another Chinese we frequently to raise the organization gold, the flying snow computation partial staffs process the Chinese gold raise organization to attempt there are this troper. The character certainly by the babelfish program, itself converts, as for snow happy Funtime Blizzard Entertainment Company " Please by all means must converts the flight building arrangement. " Moreover as for explains " for us; The terminal full of affection looks after character. " grasped with me is obtained; And we said any is attempted did not must have the idea, (the conditions is appreciated in us, resolution therefore our first idea. This is not is) insult

Wow, this is Main/MadeOfWin. May I use "Flying Snow Happy Funtime Building Place" in a story (or as a title for a story)?

Why would you have to ask? It's not like there's a trademark on it.

Not ''technically'' anyway.

This troper once saw a soccer player figurine sold in France with "Pour les ventialteurs de foot" written on it, which means "For soccer fans", except it means fan as in "device that blows air in your face".

This editor's father, who works as a proofreader, once proofread a book written by someone for whom English was their second language, titled "A Rigid Journey."

Was it about pipe wrenches?

A bar near this troper's house is called "Cafe Happys Lounge". Having never been inside, she has no idea whether it's supposed to be a joke that sounds like a BlindIdiotTranslation or if it's an actual translation of a foreign chain's name.

Two really, really poor examples of Engrish as given by a Hong Kong Wii Sensor Bar instruction booklet (probably a bootleg) were "2 piece of battery are required to operate" (for something which required 4 batteries) and "Wireless has less chance of you fall!" Probably with the exclamation mark as well.

After a bad Chobits bootleg (the first 24 episodes were actually very good... with credits still in from the fansubbers. They seem to have done their own translations very the last two, particularly amusing because the last episode is a recap episode featuring footage from previous (well-translated) scenes), this troper still uses the word "Metamorph!" as an exhortation against perverts (Although, as I understand it, this is actually a fairly literal translation from the Japanese etymology).

Hentai ''does'' mean metamorphosis. But it is meaning as pervert is more well-known (and obvious, given the context).

Wait, isn't that Hen''shin''?

Both ''tai'' and ''shin'' in these cases basically mean "body."

One translation class This Troper attended had one of these as an assignment, we had to work out what it might have meant.

This Troper's history teacher was teaching about the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He mentioned the way that Bay of Pigs is said in spanish, but the word he used for "Pigs" was the translation for using "pig" as an insult.

I'm afraid your teacher ''might'' be correct there. Bay of Pigs is English for Bahía Cochinos. In which "Cochinos" means "Pigs", yes, as an insult. Well, basically any synonym for "pig" is an insult in Spanish...

Any synonym for "pig" in spanish is indeed an insult, but it depends heavily on the context, region and even idiosyncrasy. So the opposite is also true, that any synonym for "puerco" -the most accurate translation of "pig"- is not an insult but a proper name for the animal. So in the case of Bahia de Cochinos, it is not meant as an insult.

This troper is Hungarian. We have a lot of ridiculous translation errors. Best examples are "See you later" which is almost never translated to its proper Hungarian counterpart and "manta ray" which is either translated to "manta sugár" (which can be translated back as "manta beam") or isn't even translated. And I didn't even mentioned the various ROTFL-translations of {{Technobabble}}...

This troper is incapable of reading "manta beam" without picturing it as being shouted out loud like some sort of super finishing move from an anime...

This (different) troper frequents an English-language {{Image Board}} who has a very vocal Hugarian user. He's the source of many funnies: not only is his English one step up from a {{Blind Idiot Translation}} (and also rife with myriad spelling errors), but he humorously overreacts to nearly everything. Then there's the one time he said "Our own language is crap...."

Another beautiful example of this trope is when they managed to translate "Nine inch nails" in a TV show. '''And they converted it to metric!'''

Heard at second hand, but still funny. Mandarin has two words for full: one for a person being full after eating (''bao''), and another for a thing being full like a shelf or hard drive (''man''). One kid, who was born in stateside and probably didn't speak Chinese regularly, said 'I'm full' using the second word. The story always gets a good laugh from older folks who hear it.

This troper took Japanese class, so sometimes friends ask him to translate things for them. He was once handed a clipping from a 2ch post. It was mangled 2ch-speak, but he managed to get the gist of it. He was then asked what this smiley face was doing: ~~(°∀°)~~. Apparently the guy thought the universal quantifier (the ∀) was supposed to be a hand throwing up the devil horns. (It's a mouth.)

I CAAAAAAAAAAAA~~(°∀°)~~AAAAAAAAAAAME!!

This one recalls a story told to her by her father about bad subtitles in a film he saw when he was in high school. (This would've been in the mid-to-late 1960s, by the by.) For English class, they watched a film version of the Russian translation of ''Hamlet''. Now, dad said that this translation is actually really good - apparently regarded as one of the best translations of Shakespeare. So when it came time to add English subtitles, you'd think they would use the original text. But no, they had to get the cheapest translator they could find... End result? "To be or not to be" became "''Existentialism is fruitless.''"

This troper knows French and Spanish, but likes to watch French and Spanish movies with English subtitles because...well...sometimes the translations can be a little (read: a whole hell of a lot) different from what the actors are actually saying.

Not exactly Engrish, but more of a reverse-directional version of BlindIdiotTranslation: Once in an assignment for Japanese class, this Troper tried to convert the word "fhqwhgads" into katakana. After realizing just how bad of an idea it was (never mind that there is no Q sound in Japanese, though ギュ ("gyu") comes close), this Troper decided to use a different in-joke: Nouns Turned Verbs (add -'d to the end of any noun. Also from Homestar Runner). Also to a VERY bad effect. (In case you're wondering, the intent was to see if Sensei knows about Homestar Runner. Obviously not.)

This troper wonders if this is an example in itself, since she spent awhile staring at the page trying to figure out why you'd use ギュ for Q, when you can take the tenten off and get キュ (kyu), which sounds almost exactly like 'Q'. Maybe she's missing something?

I think the troper above you meant the sound a "Q" (or more accurately, a "Qu-" makes in a word (you know, that "Kw-" sound). I don't think Japanese has that sound.

This troper owns a cheap dollar store keyboard where a socket for external power is labeled "POWERSOCKEY" (this of course has become his pet name for the keyboard itself), and the two settings for the power switch are apparently "Off" and '''"No"'''. While both of these could be unnoticed typing errors, he has no idea what "Eight-twelve music selected", printed across the top of the keyboard, could possibly mean.

This troper once tried translating Daddy Yankee's song 'Gasolina' through a babel fish program because she didn't know what the lyrics meant. The first few lines are something about the cat (babe) turning on the motors, but it came out of the program as, "My cats pledge the motors", and this troper was totally confused.

This troper's friends used to have lots of fun with online text translators, especially with pasting in English song lyrics and running them through multiple languages. "Seven Seas Of Rhye" by Queen yielded "I challenge the mighty titanium can" (instead of "the mighty titan"), "Ice Ice Baby" included "freeze the ice cold baby too" (instead of "ice ice baby too cold", of course), and perhaps best of all, in "Fuel" by Metallica, "Gimme that which I desire" somehow became "Gimme that which my the Irish". And there exists an mp3 of this troper reciting an oddly Shakespearean machine re-translated version of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot (or as the translation would have it, "The Baby Returned" by Mr. Mix-A-Leaves) over Pachelbel's Canon.

One of the people this troper [=RPs=] with isn't that good with grammar, but when he fixed that problem, he decided to make his main character keep up the bizarre engrish to emphasize his screw-up personality. One of my personal favorites is "DECLARE ME THE WIN".

This troper remembers when the translator for the Spanish safety meeting complained that the handouts only had sense if you spoke both English and Spanish as they didn't account for grammar changes.

This troper recalls seeing a list of mis-translations of instruction booklets. One which came with a blender (and which the troper cannot remember the source language) simply read in English, "Do not use for the other use." The mind boggles.

This troper personally saw that exact warning in a piece of networking equipment ordered from Korea. It was followed by a stern warning: "Do not try to change it on your mind."

This Italian troper once read an instruction manual for her new mouse. Now, the Italian word for the thing that moves your pointer around the screen is ''still'' "mouse"; the word for the animal is "topo". Also, "palla" is the correct translation for the term "ball" both in the meaning of round object that rolls and testicle (but I think it holds a more vulgar undertone). Well, the manual read "se la palla del topo ha difficoltà a muoversi, pulirla". Which means ''If the rodent's testicle has difficulty moving, clean it."

Even in English, this can be awkward.

A set of Korean-made kitchen knives came in a package with the warning "Keep out of children."

Assuming the owner is not a psychotic serial killer, that's actually good advice. Painfully obvious, but good nonetheless.

Back around 1980 or so, this troper's sister bought a small black & white TV, Made In Korea. The manual contained gems such as "Beeldbinnenband" and "Televisie zetten", posing as translations for "Picture tube" and "Television set". Well, "binnenband" *is* a translation of "tube", but it refers to the type you may find in a tyre, and "zetten" *is* a translation of "set". As a verb, not a noun. It appears to have come out of the first Korean-Dutch translation program (version 0.1-pre alpha), or some hapless Korean had only been able to find a dictionary that translated into Dutch from Swahili, forcing him to use his Korean-Hungarian and Hungarian-Swahili phrasebooks as intermediate steps.

This troper recently saw "Insert CD and run wizard", on a sleeve for an installation CD for a router, translated in French to "Insérez le magicien de CD et de course", which would actually translate back to "Insert the wizard of the CD and race".

Shouldn't this be "Insert the magician of the CD and of the race"?

I'm French (-Canadian, actually). It translates back in english as "insert the CD and race (or racing, the noun) magician".

My school has an exchange program with a school in Japan. This troper got to host one, and gets e-mails from her saying things like "I'm a person with no sence of machine" (talking about getting a facebook) and "To abroad has many intererts and discovers". Literally ''every time they opened their mouths'', someone went 'Aww!'

This troper has seen a "'''Forbid to embezzle the fire apparatus'''" sign in a restaurant in Wuxi (near Shanghai). This admonishment has been subjected to a limited sort of MemeticMutation within his (largely bilingual) workplace. #QUOTE#'''This troper''': You are forbidded to embezzle the writing apparatus.

This troper read a sign on the door of my French class to a French exchange student, and he chuckled, because apparently it said "Do make sure to be not in here without the proper pencil." It evolved quickly into a meme, and then became mutated several times. One of which was "Do make sure to be not in here without the proper people"

This troper's friend once brought to school the manual for his new phone. "Do not throw battery in fire may cause to rupter leak and cooks meals"

One of this troper's friends once found a fortune cookie that said "Be patient! The Great Wall didn't got build in a day!"

This troper's roommate bought shampoo from Chinatown that was anti-dandruff. The only English words on it were "Anti-Falling Shampoo"- as in, anti-flaking. That's the only reason he bought it.

This troper freely engages in it for the Werewolf: The Forsaken game he's running, mostly because he's playing it out as something resembling a bad '40s or '50s pulp movie. And it works quite well, thank you.

This troper once had the pleasure of reading a machine translation which referred to the director's assistant as the director's midfielder, apparently because of a homonym in the original language.

In France, this troper once saw spare ribs labelled as "shortcomings of pork" (for "travers de porc").

Every once in a while, this troper tries to talk to someone who speaks a different language. Since this happens online, theres online translators involved. So, naturally, engrish will be a sure part of the conversation.

This troper saw plenty in Normandy.

I saw a French ad for a (probably English) online game that reads "Hé vous! Comme vampires?". Which translates back to "Hey you! Similar vampires?". Most likely the original was "like vampires".

I remember seeing in a TV schedule the French game show "La Carte au trésor" translated as "Card from the safe" (instead of "Treasure map").

This troper remembers the drivers for a modem he bought for his PC had a rather poor translation; when trying to set it up within Windows 95, it'll display the error "This program must no execute under this version of Windows". Also, there was the DVD remote he saw that warned not to "old battery new one", and the "Relevant Crazy Warning" he saw on the box to a bootleg Famicom

The fiction for the end of ''{{Warhammer}}'''s Storm of Chaos campaign was released on the Spanish site before any of the others. A site I frequented at the time quickly ran it through Babelfish and... well, the result inspired a strip in a Warhammer-based webcomic. Hellcannon as "Infernales tubes", Archaon, the Gentleman of the Time End... It had everything. Naturally, the comic finished up with a Chaos Dwarf shouting "All your base are belong to us!"

This French troper once had an Irish exchange student student in his class who was mightily confused at the concept of a "bald-mouse" mentioned in a physics test, and why it would use echolocation. (The French for "bat" is chauve-souris, the individual words mean "bald" and "mouse". And no, I don't know who ever shaved a mouse and decided it looked like a bat. We're just weird like that.)

We tried to directly translate "The Muffin man" into french, then back into English through an online translator. what we got was "Do you know the Man of Roll, the Man of Roll, The Man of Roll. Do you know the Man of Roll which lives on Drury Rue"

Oh my god, so that's where Rick lives!

This troper wishes he had the screenshots of the really really weird Subtitling for STar Wars: Revenge of the sith. There was a time in which a character was saying something that supposedly translated to "And my pants went to Syria" in English.

You are presumably referring to the one that gave us Vader's BigNo as Do Not Want? Try this one or this one.

This troper once came across a Dutch-to-English fansub for "Sta Paraat" ("Be Prepared"), the VillainSong from ''TheLionKing''. #QUOTE#'''Dutch:''' "Al werkt jullie brein niet naar behoren\\ functioneert slechts één enkele keer\\ spits toch als het kan jullie oren\\ het gaat om een kwestie van eer"\\ '''Subtitles:''' "Although works your brain not as it should\\ functions only one single time\\ sharpen however if it's possible your ears\\ it goes about a matter of honour"

This troper's friend was practicing Spanish with her, and her friend said "The ice caps are melting because of people like (Somebody in our class who doesn't care about the environment)." Which is a perfectly good sentence, except that she used "gustar", which means like as in "to be fond of" rather than like as in "to be similar to". So she was really saying "The ice caps are melting because people are fond of (That person)."

The mexican troper is exposed to this on a daily basis on subtitles and dubs for american movies, series, cartoons, etc., But probably the funniest example was found on a Star Trek movie (probably Insurrection, but could have been First Contact). The subtitles were done by professionals, for a movie theater showing, but apparently whoever was writing those subs, had no idea how to translate the simple word core, so he/she went by the rule of "any word in english is spanish if you put an 'o' at the end", and the subs came with "coro" as a translation for core in every line the word was used, and as you might now, in Star Trek the word core is used in every other line, the warp core is always undergoing something. The thing is "coro" is spanish for chorus, like in a group of people singing, so this troper spend the entire movie picturing in his head a group of children, deep withing the Enterprise, singing at the top of their lungs every time the ship had to go into warp.

The DSL modem this troper received from his ISP is full of those on its documentation. Apparently it was translated from Chinese to English, THEN to Portuguese (as, if you translate it from Portuguese back to English using Google Translator, the sentences are reasonably meaningful). Fortunately the modem software is in pretty decent English.

This troper decided to post one of his Facebook status updates in Japanese.

What he meant to translate to Japanese: "I want to go to the club meeting, but I have to do my term paper for Japanese class so I can't go."

What he typed: "[レイ]は[クラブの会議]に行きたいで、でも日本語のクラスのタームペーパーを行かなければなりません。"

What it translates back to: "[Ray] wants to go to [the club meeting], but '''he has to go to his term paper for Japanese class.'''" \\ This was pointed out by a friend who is more fluent in Japanese. Cue this troper doing a double {{Facepalm}}.

When this troper's friend bought a cheap pair of Korean headphones on the market, this troper remembered this trope and decided to check the instructions. Most of it was written in awakward Hebrew, but still understandable. Except for the one sentence that still remained a mistory to this troper, and roughtly translates to "Headphones will not work unless your teamwork sticks into."

This troper is rather guilty of this. I attempted to translate one of my fanfics into French based on a little over three years worth of studying. The result, according to various reviews, was incoherent bordering on TranslationTrainWreck. I'm still waiting for help.

This troper, despite only getting a quarter of the gist of Japanese grammar, tried translating (from English) a random sentence from a comic script into Japanese. I am guessing, from how improper the words sound spoken, is as bad as a translation can be.

This troper had a fairly tenuous grasp of Spanish grammar back in the day in regards to capitalization. He needed to write a short story in Spanish and decided to involve a fictional band; figuring that since the "Papas" in the band name didn't have an accent over the last a, it would translate into "The Four Potatoes". Apparently, "papa" is the word for "Pope" when capitalized.

This troper and her friend wanted to convert the quote "Knowledge is power and power corrupts, so study hard and be evil" into Latin, for maximized awesomeness factor. We translated the original quote back into English afterward to make sure it was sound and got "Science is cry and cry to ravish so stud made of iron and to emerge evil".

My German class used to torment our teacher by using blind idiot translations for articles she gave us. For instance, she once made us read something about Ash Wednesday, so we all wrote reports about "ashtray midweek", or something like that.

This Polish troper used to correct her classmates' English homework in middle school. Many of them tended to write stuff in Polish and then use Babelfish or something like that. This troper often ended up asking them for the original texts and translating them herself.

We had a German exchange student in my biology class for a time, and she was not good with microscopes. Her looking down one and saying "All I see is bush!" quickly assumed memetic stasis in said class. The rest of her English was relatively good, however.

OMG, seeing only Bush must be a problem...

I once saw a bilingual sign next to a crosswalk. The sign said "Cross Here - ''Cruz Aqui''". is a noun.

A French hotel once "proposed" me "12 chains of TV."

This troper once made fun of ''MegamanBattleNetwork 4'''s BlindIdiotTranslation. #QUOTE# '''Lan''': Battle Routine setting! #QUOTE# '''Megaman''': Excuse!

I'm Venezuelan. Before I "learned" English, I tried to translate to Spanish the name of the show MyLifeAsATeenageRobot, but that ended up being "Mi vida es una robot adolescente" (My Life IS a Teenage Robot"). God bless English teachers...

This Mexican Troper's mother is an english teacher, and he often helps her grade her students' tests, which means sometimes watching some very amusing things when they attempt to talk about field trips. Like one guy who said that "We went to the happy lobster restaurant and I ate all my friends".

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bad Translator. It puts the text through as many different Google translations all at the same time. For example, after putting in the first three sentences on the HomePage and setting it to go through all 56 languages, this troper got this: #QUOTE#"Author of hate and discrimination in the Tropical Klich earth assumption that prices and service feature."

The first paragraph of this trope page became ""Please note appears in two versions, I do not know. If the production of damage.""

"Bet you cannot mistranslate this" got me (after 56 translations) this: "It was a mistake."

This troper once saw a Chinese version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with English subtitles. Only one problem: ''the subtitles were round-trip translated.'' Which meant that other characters and events such as Quidditch apparently had names that were so bad that I forgot them.

ItGotWorse. We eventually found out the DVD was a bootleg from China because the computer downloaded a fake "antivirus-style" piece of malware that pops up every minute of the movie.

I am an avid fan of Japanese and Korean Pop music. But, unfortunately, there's always a problem with them using english in their songs, as you can't even goddamn understand it! Their use of Engrish in the song annoys me to death! I mean, if some of them can speak English well... yeah --- it'd be better. Some are fluent in English though; like Utada, MiChi,SNSD's Tiffany + Jessica, but most? NO. Don't even get me started on Ayumi Hamasaki's accent!

And let's not forget Google Translate. When I was trying to determine if a Japanese cover of SNSD's 'Hoot' was done by a computer, I got a strange response translating the description. "the japanese cotton system does not know much hangul."

Cotton?! Really?

I also just translated the lyrics for Koda Kumi's song "POP DIVA" from kanji. Part of my result- "The light which crowds pouring, by the power which stands up many times even in each and everyday last deadline which is attached to the body the nail mark my life which is left I hope you got it that I' By your is not m somebody I need nobody other anyone"

it. Makes. No. SENSE!

How about "For Enjoy Play Air Sports Gun Shooting" on a toy gun this Troper's dad got in Japan?

The same troper's friend in Japan also would complain of this with my mother's emails, translated through Babelfish. "I understand but it sounded very strange..."

This troper once bought a step ladder which had a warning akin to "Never open her legs if she or the floor is wet!" on the instructions.

This Troper hailing from a country which is infamous for it's awful translations (Hello Poland!),after she learned some literacy in English,refused to watch subs,later dubs of anything.Even though nowadays the right people took the jobs of translators and they are doing fairly well,she always strives to see the original work first before agreeing to watch something translated.The literal translation also comes natural to bilingual speakers as the process is often based on translating the sentence as it is and then trying to correct it with the right synonym because even the right words may bring different meaning.

This troper once translated a sentence about his brothers having a Pokemon battle on two Nintendo DSes through several languages on Google Translate, translating every foreign-language result into English. After a few translations, it was ARMENIANS that were battling, not Pokemon, and the Department of National Security (which may or may not exist) was mentioned in the first sentence. The current version (with names removed to protect the innocent) reads 'In order to assist the State Department and National Security in Germany before the war is worthy of Armenia (I think that we have, we have started, but it is not), is in the library. Armenians, who often use very serious. Although [DATA EXPUNGED] large Togetic. Of course, [REDACTED]. Check the behavior of random numbers used by accelerator Armenia, good roads, Togetic. Each enterprise. Management Arceus as a symbol of the Armenian legends