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Tuesday’s Trope: Blind Idiot Translation

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Someone set up us the bomb! What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets! I am error. You spoony bard! I feel asleep!

Ridiculous dialogue has been a mainstay of video games since the days of the NES. It doesn't come out of thin air, though. Nearly every instance of truly ridiculous text in a video game is the result of a poor translation job. In tropespeak, it's a Blind Idiot Translation. It can be as simple as mixing up an L for an R (Japanese treats both as the same phonetic sound), or as complicated as utterly messing up a main character's name and lines.

Blind Idiot Translations aren't so big a problem today, but before video game companies actually started to make an effort in translating their games into English, you couldn't walk past an NES without tripping over a cartridge filled with insane ramblings.

Notable Blind Idiot Translations include:

• Every single Resident Evil game has English audio— even in the Japanese releases. The very first Resident Evil was dubbed by native English speaking voice actors, but overseen by a Japanese director. Thus you get such Good Bad Translation lines as 'This hall is dangerous! There are terrible demons! Ouch!' (and yes, he does say the word 'ouch').
  
• Final Fantasy X has the gem "When I grow up, I wanna be a blitzball!" said by a little boy.
• Final Fantasy Tactics has a notoriously bad translation, with such gems as mistranslating "Fire Breath" as "Fire Bracelet", and being totally inconsistent with name spellings (such as Luveria/Ruvelia).
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow translated "Rubicante" as the unintentially amusing "Lubicant", and "Scarmiglione" became "Skull Millione" - take that, Dante. Likewise, an excellent way to annoy anyone with a passing familiarity with Hindu mythology is to refer, as they did, to a certain bloodthirsty goddess as "Curly".
• The fourth game in the Megaman Battle Network series introduces a class of bad guys that should have been translated as HeelNavi... instead the player was faced with HealNavis. This was especially funny because the name was in no way appropriate to their appearance; HealNavis are big bruisers with spiky armor.
• Samurai Shodown IV is always happy to declare "victoly!"
• The X-Men arcade Beat Em Up notoriously has Magneto unleash a sneak attack on the players while proclaiming "X-Men - WELCOME TO DIE!"
• The Maru Mari and Varia from Metroid. Maru Mari literally translates as "round ball" or "circle ball", of course this later became Morph Ball. The "Varia" (suit) was originally meant to be called the Barrier Suit. However, the name Varia caught on and has been used ever since...