googlegrenade

2257

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user:goolgenerade is a wiki contributor who wants to help translate things from japanese into english. unfortunately for him, his grasp of the english language, wiki policy, and basic etiquette are all abysmal. unfortunately for everyone else, he's been an active editor for two years and has left his nonsense all over the wiki. here i will share my favorite examples of his "translations", starting with the classics:



doors o' plenty

original text: "たのしい わがやへ ようこそ! なきわめいても だれも たすけにこないよ!"
goolgenerade's translation: "Welcome to my home sweet home! No one'll help u if sad!"
my translation: "Welcome to my fun home! Even if you throw a tantrum, nobody will come to help you!"

one day, i was innocently browsing the super mario wiki and stumbled across the sentence "no one'll help u if sad". it made me laugh so hard i was in physical pain. i immediately had to look through the editor's contribution history to see if he had contributed anything else this beautiful, which he had



bombarded by bob-ombs

original: "おまえたち 今日(きょう)のえものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)におむかえするんや!"
gool: "Guys, ur today's target is "Da Mario". Welcome with bibbangs."
me: "Today, your prey is Mr. Mario. Receive him flashily."

now to be fair, this is pretty hard to translate. i'm not totally satisfied with the way i translated it either. i thought about making the second sentence something like "let's give 'em a show", but i thought that might be taking too many liberties. all that aside, what? the fuck?? is a bibbang???

actually, we can look through the page history to find out what a bibbang is: goolgenerade originally wrote "big bangs", but then changed it to that nonsense word to "express Kansai Dialect". apparently, in kansai, people regularly sprinkle meaningless words that they invented on the spot into the things they say. who knew?



kakushi koopa jō

original: "オレサマの かくし部屋(べや)のお宝(たから)! おまえにはぜったい わたさん!!"
gool: "Treasure in a hidden chamber! Want it? OH, HELL NO!!"
me: "The treasure of my hidden room! I absolutely won't hand it over to you!!"

there are so many beautiful things about this that it's hard to pick a favorite. the ridiculous image of bowser saying "HELL NO". the fact that what gool wrote has virtually no relationship to the original text. the edit where he decided bowser should be british

but i think the best thing is that when some innocent person came through and changed the translation to something that was halfway accurate to the japanese text, goolgenerade reverted their edit with the comment "Well this is more accurate."



professor elvin gadd

original: "オヤ・マー博士"
gool: "Dr. O.M.G."

the thing about this one is that "professor e. gadd" is a really good translation of his japanese name, "oya maa hakase". "egads!" is an expression of shock in english, just like "oyamaa!" is an expression of shock in japanese

"dr. o.m.g." is also a translation of his japanese name, but it's completely superfluous because the wiki already had an explanation of why his japanese name is what it is. then again, we can at least be grateful that he left that explanation in place. usually when the wiki has a prexisting translation of something, he outright deletes it so that his nonsense is all that readers see



storm chasers

original: "あめふりパックン"
gool: "Pirainha"
me: "Rainfall Piranha Plant"

"あめふり" means rainfall. "パックン" means piranha plant. two very simple words in a row, nothing particularly groundbreaking going on here. and yet somehow, he manages to translate them into the ridiculous portmanteau word "pirainha". what??

i think one of gool's major problems is that he wants to be a localiser, not a translator. i mean, don't get me wrong. he wouldn't make a good localiser either. but whereas "pirainha" is absolutely horrible if you consider it a translation, it's merely mediocre if you think of it as a localisation. i would give it a "C-", for "that was pathetic, but at least you tried"

another funny thing about this one is that he got into an edit war about it. originally someone added the almost correct translation "rainy piranha" to the article. then gool swung by and changed it to the incorrect "rain and piranha". a few months later some person called kahran042 came and changed it to the correct "rainfall piranha". this apparently pissed gool off, because he immediately changed it back with the comment "Fixed WEIRD Japanese translation.". even funnier is the fact that this reversion was part of some kind of campaign he engaged in to revert a whole bunch of kahran042's (correct) translations back to his own (wildly incorrect) versions. my favorite part is when he decided to insult kahran042 in the comments of an article kahran042 had never even edited



so ok that turned into a much longer post than i expected, and i've only talked about like five "translations". maybe if people think these are enjoyable i'll do some more later. you could also just look through his edit history yourself, though. a lot of the things he writes are so blatantly wrong that you don't really even need to be able to speak japanese to find them. do share if you find anything good
 
he and Tailikku1 have reverted each others edits for pr'y 2 months now. Goolgenrade is blocked until sometime in February though.
 
theres a bunch of weird stuff you find while randomly going across the wiki.

Theres also some controversy about who exactly wrote which music track in mkwii (2 composers are credited for it).

I could find no official sources, yet some editor on the wiki appearently knows more than the rest of the internet and attributed a lot of the tracks to just one of the composers.

It's hard to describe, so here: http://www.mariowiki.com/Talk:Asuka_Ohta#Unsourced_Tracklist



on topic though, how did that go unnoticed for so long?

Well I'm probably the only person who showed overly much interest to the names in other languages section back when they were active on the wiki, lol.
 
freakworld said:
on topic though, how did that go unnoticed for so long?

Well I'm probably the only person who showed overly much interest to the names in other languages section back when they were active on the wiki, lol.
Yeah, exactly - not enough active editors with enough knowledge of Japanese checking names sections on a routine basis (most of them aren't ridiculous, so it's not until you look closely that you realize how many liberties he's taken with the grammar and vocab). I'm one of the few users who does know Japanese and likes name stuff, but I never really crossed paths with him enough to notice there was a serial problem until recently (but after I started correcting him on a regular basis, things got REAL (Talk:Bowser's_Lovely_Lift!)), since a lot of his edits are on pages I don't really visit, and it seems that a lot of his editing spurts have coincided with times (both hourly and seasonally speaking) where I was too busy with field work IRL to keep an eye on RecentChanges.



Anyway, I've been going through Gool's contributions edit by edit; thankfully, he likes revisiting the same pages over and over, so it's not as monumental a task as I thought it would be setting out, and I'm already up to July 2014 (plus I already did a bunch of his recent edits during his fist block).

His early stuff's pretty tame. Yhis random "bridgeway" change was one of the weirdest, and the most unsettling because usually his Japanese is usually correct (but not always). This recent Tizer one is also pretty random - I changed it to Appletizer, based on Google results for searching " タイザー", so hopefully that seems reasonable?

The only I haven't been able to fix outright was Banshee Boardwalk (Banshee_Boardwalk#Names_in_other_languages) - I can find lots of uses of ヒュードロ but no solid definitions or clear origins. I wanna say it's about monsters that look like humans, or perhaps is just something like "spooky", but a second opinion would be appreciated.



2257 said:
"dr. o.m.g." is also a translation of his japanese name, but it's completely superfluous because the wiki already had an explanation of why his japanese name is what it is. then again, we can at least be grateful that he left that explanation in place. usually when the wiki has a prexisting translation of something, he outright deletes it so that his nonsense is all that readers see
"Hey don't add unnecessary info."
 
i think hyuudoro is derived from hyuuhyuu and dorodoro
 
"Hyuuhyuu" (ヒューヒュー) being the sound of the wind howling and "Dorodoro" (ドロドロ) being onomatopoeia for something muddy or gloppy.

2257 thinks this because I'm the one who suggested it. ;)
 
Ah man, I should've known is was mimetic - it seems like half the names in this series have onomatopoeas in them, srsly. Anyway, thanks, I will add that to all the pages with ヒュードロ in the name.
 
I wish I caught his edits but I have zero understanding in any language aside from English. Granted, I have flubbed several French translations regarding some WarioWare: Touched content but at least I know they're not right.
 
According to my dictionaries:

「応用」 - practical assessment
「編」 - compilation

From what I can tell from the Internet, taken together, they mean problems that must be solved using the application of previously learned skills, such as review questions in textbooks (as he mentions in his edit summary), generally with the implication of using theoretical knowledge in real-life situations (so like word problems turning math theory into "find the tree height using trigonometry", etc.).

So the original name's better, but requires explanation as it's condensing the meaning a bit. My attempt.
 
On a side note, I like how mwchat has a "welcome with bibbangs" now.

Any reason Gatorade makes dumb spellings like substituting "you" for "u", "your" for "ur", "the" for "da", "this" for "dis"? Is he trying to convey slang or something?
 
Yeah, it's originally in kansai, which is a different dialect of Japanese, so I think Gatorade is trying to make some sort of different English dialect, accent, or slang or something.
 
"Hey it's so nonsense to teach Japanese to Japanese person. Yeah, okay, I've got it. Don't come 4 good." -Gogogadget
 
He says he's a native. Can a native speaker flub this badly? I mean, his talking doesn't sound like a native speaker of English, but at least it's more coherent than his translations.

Anyway, please do more. It's entertaining.
 
Goolgenerade's probably the most prolific example of this, but it makes me wonder how many other people made translations of dubious merit and got away with it. Tailikku's already been mentioned, and hopefully some good can come out of this and we'll pay more attention to translations.
 
These japanese sentences are mostly unformal/slang, and one of them is even a dialect that most japanese have trouble with
おまえたち 今日(きょう)のえものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)におむかえするんや!"

I understand what is says but for me it's really hard to translate kansai
 
Kansai gets easier with practice, thankfully: when I was starting out with translations, it'd run me around for ages with its random words not in my dictionaries, but now I'm getting better at realizing what I'm dealing with and just going and finding a list of slang to fill in those blanks, and then ignoring how they use things like "ya de" and "-han" and just translating it the same as if it'd been "da yo" or "-san", and whatnot.


Anyway, for fun, I did my own translation of the quote (conveniently not realizing it was our favourite one until I got to 派手, and so, was able to do it blind), and then went through the full page history of Bombarded by Bob-ombs, and I give you...

A History of Bibbangs

original text added to page by 2257 said:
おまえたち今日のえものはマリオはんやでにおむかえするんや
Weedle McHairybug: "Ye will exceed today's Mario second in? To be faced and [??]"
Iggy Koopa Jr: "Your target today is Mario? Meet him at [?]"

text updated by Gool said:
おまえたちきょうのえものはマリオはんやで? はでにおむかえするんや
Gool #1: "Is your today's target Mario? Welcome with fire."
Gool #2: "Is ur today's target Mario? Welcome with big bangs."
Gool #3: "Guys, ur today's target is "The Mario". Welcome with big bangs."
Gool #4: "Guys, ur today's target is "Da Mario". Welcome with bibbangs."

text updated from the card by 2257 said:
おまえたち 今日(きょう)のえものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)におむかえするんや!
2257: "Today, your prey is Mr. Mario. Receive him flashily."
Me: "You lot, today's prey is Mr. Mario, welcome him colourfully!"

And the colour version:

text updated from the card by 2257 said:
おまえたち 今日(きょう)えものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)むかえするんや
Gool #4: "Guys, ur today's target is "Da Mario". Welcome with bibbangs."
2257: "Today, your prey is Mr. Mario. Receive him flashily."
Me: "You lot, today's prey is Mr. Mario, welcome him colourfully!"
 
I don't see a question mark on there

also is it just a coincidence you chose Roy Koopa (hi, guys) for your examples?
 
That's the point: there isn't one.

And lol, get over yerself, m8, like srsly - Roy's the only Koopaling who speaks in Kansai-ben, so his dialogue is the hardest to translate overall, and makes for the weirdest, most amusing Gool quotations. That is all.

Lord Millennium said:
that last translation was perfect
Thanks, glad you approve!
 
Walkazo said:
text updated from the card by 2257 said:
おまえたち 今日(きょう)のえものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)におむかえするんや!
2257: "Today, your prey is Mr. Mario. Receive him flashily."
Me: "You lot, today's prey is Mr. Mario, welcome him colourfully!"

And the colour version:

text updated from the card by 2257 said:
おまえたち 今日(きょう)えものは マリオはんやで 派手(はで)むかえするんや
Gool #4: "Guys, ur today's target is "Da Mario". Welcome with bibbangs."
2257: "Today, your prey is Mr. Mario. Receive him flashily."
Me: "You lot, today's prey is Mr. Mario, welcome him colourfully!"
Beautiful.

Bib-(b)ang should be a new Bob-omb subspecies variant.
 
Already? Man, my goal was to get through the backlog of edits before now, but I've been so busy with other stuff, I stalled at Oct 2014. Really hope the backlog doesn't build up before I can get back to work...
 
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