"That will go well with my crackers and cheese because here's a block!"

The "I hope you're thirsty" one is classy imo.

All you base are belong to me

Much more impressive too!

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy Tactics with the translation-so-bad-it’s-might-be-a-masterpiece.

Actually interesting and novel ability names

Japanese: Dance with knives

1997 Localization: Wiznaibus

WotL Localization: Mincing Minuet

Dialog that pulls no punches

Japanese: My bad, but it's between you and your god

1997 Localization: Tough luck...Don't blame me. Blame yourself or God.

WoTL Localization: Forgive me. 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I.

Other gems lost in the improved localization:

• “heavens wish to destroy all minds”
• “the doom of a planet”
• “evanescence, such a sad word”
• “time, save your kindness for the worthy”

All that being said, the final fantasy gang is generally spectacular with English mastery. It’s like you can tell which books they like to read when they choose obscure words like Eidolon.

The interesting thing about clarifying and localising is that you're always consciously making a trade-off between multiple competing factors - the original direct meaning, the emotion, tone and intent, and the ease of consumption in the target context.

And so how you choose to translate depends not only on the text, but the circumstance, the speaker, and who you are translating for.

If in a manga for example a character says (in Japanese) "the child of a frog is a frog," you could make the choice to localise that with an equivalent English idiom, as "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," or you could perhaps instead take the speaking character's personality into stronger account and preserve their meaning, such as "He's a piece of shit, just like his old man."

But it all depends on context. If that idiom showed up in a piece of poetry you might decide to leave it exactly as "the child of a frog is a frog." - Perhaps there is related symbolism to preserve, and the 'frog' metaphor is important. But in that situation you can do it, because the reader will have more time and desire to study it, and preserving the original words may be more important than making it easy on the reader.

Translation is as much of an art as writing is.

That's something that occurred to me playing Breath of the Wild. A lot of the item names like "rushroom" or "armoranth" are pun-based. And this game was written in Japanese and translated to English, along with at least a dozen other languages. Did they have teams of multilingual people sitting around coming up with puns? It occurs to me there are things like "Swift Violet" that aren't punny...in English at least. But then you've got Hot Footed Frog, and the frog model has red feet.

What about...there's a Gerudo or two that you can rent sand seals from, and there's a lot of seal-based puns. "Seal ya later" "Let's Seal The Deal" etc. How was that implemented in Japanese, Russian and Portuguese? I imagine that in some cases you'd just drop it and put straightforward dialog there, but make another character quirky in a language where that does work.

What about in TOTK, the quest about exploring in underpants? That quest outright relies on two sentences that mean two specific things can be mistaken for each other, they would have had to translate "All other paths/in underpants" into like 20 languages. What a pain in the ass that had to be.

Free Hat!

I mean, honestly? Yeah. This isn't how you should translate if you wish to adhere to the original material. You need to understand meaning and context in both languages. AI doesn't grasp that on account of not grasping anything at all, and the game of telephone that the image is suggesting is completely obliterating it as well.

Example; Lipton, in an ice tea advert had an actress dance and sing, and in the middle of it, took a sip of tea and said 「美味ちい」

If you were to translate that directly, she sips the tea and says "Tasty!" or "Yummy!" which is acceptable. However, you've lost the double entendre of how チー (ちい) sounds like the English word tea, which is kind of relevant given what they're advertising and so you'd lose the opportunity to make the same pun in English; "Tealicious!"

Now apply it on a larger scale and suddenly characters and stories end up diverging between the versions. Sure the overall picture might be similar but the nuance can be vastly different. I saw it all the time in Final Fantasy XIV. Sure, not all media needs that kind of meticulousness and hell, a lot of media doesn't even care for it. People can be perfectly happy with basic, but they also don't necessarily know what they're missing.

Granted, sometimes you have to settle for that method of translation, because you can't easily or appropriately convey the original intent in another language.

I watch everything with subtitles on and it’s clear when someone used a machine vs an actual person.

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth did a good job with localization. I remember one character speaking with a thick Southern US accent, and at one point mentioning that she was from Kansai. I didn't previously know that Kansai was rural, but I was able to get that from the context.

Transliteration is another thing entirely: it's translating the sounds. "I'll beat you so that the lights in your eyes go out" translated to Japanese is "君の目の光が消えるまで殴ってやる". Transliterated back, it's "Kimi no me no hikari ga kieru made nagutte yaru".

assault

Actually, I think it’s made with a sugar