$15
Login to create a wish list!

Description:

Take a linguistic journey through video game history with the Legends of Localization team in This Is a Book of Bad Video Game Translations! Japan's love of "decorative English", a long list of misleading loan words, and the tight deadlines and shoestring staffs of early game development created a new video game dialect that is beloved - and still spoken - to this day.

Features:

  • Bad video game translations from the 1970s to today
  • 64 pages filled with 99 bad translations
  • Insight on why certain translation mistakes happen
  • Suggestions for good games with bad translations to experience for yourself!

Further details:

This be book bad translation, video games! chronicles the history of the phenomenon of poor Japanese-to-English video game translation from the 1970s until today. It also explains the root causes of bad translations, how translation practices have changed over the years as the industry matured (starting from the no-budget affairs in the early days and leading up to the machine translations found in the mobile market today), and specific patterns that are found in bad translations. The unusual title of the book itself is the result of modern machine translation.

This book ships all over the world! Check our shipping page for more details. E-mail orders@fangamer.com for brick and mortar wholesale inquiries.

Reviews

6 reviews Write a Review
Benjamin J
Verified Buyer
12/30/2022
Quick but quality book.
Positives: + Really interesting and fascinating. + Nicely put together information. + Lots of good pictures for examples. + Does a good job capturing the history of Japan to English translations in a relatively small package. Negatives: -Still pretty short. Feels more like a pamphlet. - The pictures usually take up 90% of the page. 90% of this book Is literally just examples of bad translations with not a lot of explaining of them.
Review image for Quick but quality book.Review image for Quick but quality book.Review image for Quick but quality book.Review image for Quick but quality book.
Chiara D
Verified Buyer
9/24/2020
Great book and amazing service
Not only this is a must-have book for all the video games lovers and passionate, it also makes a great gift for your colleagues, if you are working in the localization industry ;) I bought this book for myself and for some special colleagues of mine and they all loved it :D As if this was not enough, I have to thank the incredibly supporting staff of fangamer, who helped me arranging a gift and even handwrote a message on my behalf. I was not expecting so much, thank you a lot, you made my (and my recipient's) day! Super-recommended!
Christine S
Verified Buyer
11/12/2019
Niche but nice
This is a lovely collection of weird texts that made it into published games. If you played these you probably just shook your head and pressed the button; but if you have an interest or experience in translation/localisation the vast majority of examples in here will make you smirk, chuckle and lol. Very happy that someone pulled all of these together - what Paula said!
Vincent B
4/3/2018
Short but sweet!
This book goes through several different eras of how Japanese to English translation was handled, all the way from the 70s into modern times. It takes the best or silliest examples of bad/weird translation from many different games, all sourced properly and printed in beautiful, colorful quality. The book gave me many chuckles and it made me reminisce about some of the games I recognize and how, in hindsight (since I didn't know English very well as a kid), their translation was pretty hilarious.
Paula P
Verified Buyer
8/16/2017
Funny, witty and interesting!
It had been a long time since I laughed out loud so hard with a book, it makes me want to make a compilation about mistranslations into Spanish! Clyde and Tony, thanks for giving us the chance to have such a good time while learning about videogames, localization, translation and our value as professionals. You did an amazing job!