Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
We’ve looked at lots of notoriously bad game translations into English over the years, so a common question I get is: Does Japan have famous bad game translation quotes too?
I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but I’ve listed a few bad English-to-Japanese game translation quotes that I’m familiar with.
I hope to update this article once in a while, so if you know of any other examples that belong on this page let me know!
This is probably one of the most famous and most widely known bad game translation quotes in Japan. It originates from the Japanese version of S.T.U.N. Runner, an old Atari arcade game that was developed in English first.
The actual phrase is コインいっこ いれる(koin ikko ireru) and is supposed to mean “Insert Coin”, one of the most common arcade game phrases of all time. Japanese players are already familiar with the English phrase (see why here), though, so it didn’t need to be translated at all, plus the fact that 95% of the rest of the game is entirely untranslated makes things weirder.
But most of all, the phrase koin ikko ireru is not how any normal Japanese person would ever say “Insert Coin” in this context. It’s not a grammatical disaster, and it’s obvious what it’s trying to say, but it comes off as so silly and wrong that it’s instantly memorable.
It’s difficult to explain in simple English how this Japanese phrase is wrong, but I feel it’s somewhat similar to our famous “A Winner is You!” line. In that sense, I might vaguely parallel it with a phrase like “It Enters the Coin”.
If you’re studying Japanese and wonder why the Japanese phrase is a problem, it’s primarily because it’s a plain verb and not a command or request. It almost feels like some random guy was like “hmm I wonder how you say ‘insert’ in Japanese”, looked it up in a dictionary, and used the first thing that they found, without considering how verbs actually work.
But just when you think koin ikko ireru on the title screen is memorable enough… it keeps showing up everywhere else in the game too!
On the attract mode
Elsewhere on the attract mode
During the game over screen
The high score display screen includes a slightly different variation: koin o ireru. But this is still just as wrong!
As a result of all this, koin ikko ireru has become so memorable that it’s still fondly remembered and referenced today:
Namco pokes fun at this famous retro game translation on the title screen of Techno Drive, although in this screenshot it's asking for two coins and not one
The Magical Circle Guru Guru series is full of game references, including one in this scene involving koin ikko ireru
There’ve been some coincidentally similar mistakes in other games too, including Hard Drivin’, the predecessor to S.T.U.N. Runner:
The "Insert Coin" phrase here is koin o ireyo which is also a pretty unnatural way of saying it in this context unless you're an ancient samurai or something
The high score name entry screen isn't quite as bad but it still sounds unlike what a native Japanese speaker would ever say here
This is another notoriously bad translation that Japanese gamers like to poke fun at. It originates from Pit Fighter, an Atari fighting game from the early 1990s.
In the English version of the game, if you defeat an opponent badly enough, you’ll receive a message that says “Brutality Bonus” at the end of a stage. In Japanese, this was translated as 残虐行為手当(zangyaku kōi teate).
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| Pit Fighter (Arcade, English) | Pit Fighter (Arcade, Japanese) |
The thing is, it does roughly mean “brutality bonus” in the intended sense of getting extra money for being brutal, but it’s such a bizarre, over-the-top, and memorable phrase in Japanese that it’s akin to our famous ”You spoony bard!” line – it’s not “wrong”, but boy does it stand out.
As a bonus to sounding hilarious, the translation can also have somewhat different meanings depending on the context or how you parse the phrase, including “cruelty medical treatment” and “atrocious action benefits package”. And on top of all that, the same line was used in multiple versions of the game! This further solidified Pit Fighter’s reputation for having a hilariously bad translation.
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| Pit Fighter (Sega Genesis, English) | Pit Fighter (MegaDrive, Japanese) |
As you might expect, zangyaku kōi teate is still referenced to this day:
There are so many language issues in Pit Fighter, S.T.U.N. Runner, and other Atari games that a new word was born: アタリ語(atari go, "Atari-isms").
This one’s a little different from the others. It’s not so much a popular bad translation as a notorious bad translation that got people upset. It’s from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, during a mission called “No Russian”.
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| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (English) | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Japanese) |
The idea of this mission is that you’re trying to make an attack on a Russian airport seem like it was perpetrated by Americans. So at the start of the mission, this guy says, “Remember, no Russian.” meaning, “Remember, don’t speak anything in Russian.”
The Japanese translators misunderstood this line as “no Russians”, so the text wound up saying, “Kill them. They’re Russian.” Even the Japanese voice actor says this incorrect line. Here’s a video of both versions:
I’m not really familiar with the Call of Duty series, so I’m not sure what this translation mistake results in. I’ve heard that this scene was already incredibly difficult and controversial around the world, so I imagine this mistranslation made matters worse. I do recall seeing a lot of frustration and Japanese articles about this mistake at the time, and I see it referenced frequently whenever the topic of bad game translation comes up on Japanese sites.
Fallout 4 has an incredible amount of text, and hours upon hours of audio dialogue. With so much stuff to be translated, a few mistakes here and there are understandably inevitable.
Unfortunately, one simple English phrase in Fallout 4 wound up with a hilariously strange translation in Japanese: “hell yeah!” was literally translated into 地獄だ！やぁ！(jigoku da! yaa!), which means something like “This is hell! Yahh!” or “It is hell! Yahh!”.
This phrase is heard a lot during Raider battles, so this funny mistake has made Fallout 4’s jigoku da! yaa! one of the well-known examples of strange game translations in Japan.
Some paraphrased comments from Japanese gamers (mostly from here and on Twitter) that I’ve seen include:
They translated the shout properly in the previous games, so how did they get it wrong this time?
Surely the voice actor must’ve thought this was a strange thing to say.
The translator must not have known much slang.
In a way, it kind of nicely reflects how dumb the Raiders are.
[…]You can really feel how detailed and passionate they were with Witcher 3’s subtitle translation. Unlike a certain other… Err, never mind! Well, time to say goodbye… jigoku da! ya!
Supposedly there was a company that actually, literally translated “hell yeah” as “jigoku da! yaa!”
There are also plenty of misunderstandings and rationalizations when some Japanese gamers try to pick apart the translation:
The “ya” part of “hell ya!” is apparently a shortened version of “you”, so it probably means something like “go to hell”
First, “hell” is mostly an emphasizing slang word, much like like “heck”, “fuck”, or “freak”. It’s often translated in subtitles and dubs of Western movies as “kuso”.
As for “ya”, this is a contraction of “you” or “you are”. When Raiders are on alert, they say “The hell…?”, which is a shortened version of “What the hell is going on?”. They yell “Hell ya!” when they spot an enemy, so given the situation and the word choice, it’s probably a shortened version of “Here the hell you are!”, which the Gunner also uses. In short, the proper translation of “Hell ya!” is probably something along the lines of “There the hell you are!”.
Less literal translations like “ora!” or “yossha!” might seem better at first glance, but they’re completely devoid of the “rough and tough pack of hooligans” nuance of the “hell” phrase they shout, making these options clear mistranslations. They also lack that “post-apocalyptic” vibe and aren’t suited for Fallout.
Safer translations like “See you in hell!” or “Go to hell!” would be correct, but are really worn-out and hokey. In which case, i think “jigoku da, yaa!” is fine. It’s the most Raider-like choice.
I personally think it’s something like “ssha oraa!!”, like it’s a type of curse word for angering your opponent.
It doesn’t sound too strange if you interpret it more like “This is hell! Nice of you to come! We welcome you!!!”
Whenever a super-popular Japanese game gets translated and released in other regions, it’s common to see fans zoom in on single, simple language things, read too deeply into them and misinterpret them, and turn them into a bigger deal than they really are. As we can see from this example, this same exact phenomenon happens in Japan too.
I’ve only covered a few examples here, but hopefully this article has given you an informative look into the Japanese world of bad game translation. There are certainly many more examples out there that deserve a spot on this list, so if you know of any infamous bad translations into Japanese, let me know and I’ll update this page from time to time.
Also, if you speak a different language, what bad translation quotes are famous where you’re from? I bet every culture has its own “All Your Base” stuff that the rest of the world would love to learn about!
If you liked this look at English-to-Japanese translation problems in video games, you'll definitely love this article about specific causes and this list of popular/unpopular Western game localizations into English!
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