...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
Translation with an Agenda
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Translators are professional people who would never put their political ideology, religion or other such opinions above their job, and would never violate the text in order to advance their own views. Well, most of them, anyway. This trope is about the exceptions. Translators or editors that would, yes, and do, yes, ignore or twist the original meaning of a word or text in order to advance their point of view. Serious translators consider this an utterly unprofessional and even evil breach of ethics and of the reader's trust. Unprofessional ones, however, couldn't care less, and the result is a Translation with an Agenda. These are translations that gleefully ignore or twist the original text in order to pursue a political agenda either of the translator or of the editor/employer of the translator. Whereas a Tactful Translation is meant to smoothen the edges of a situation, a Woolseyism is essentially a distilled translation or a translation with Dub Induced Plotline Changes tends to have cultural or logistical reasons, a Translation with an Agenda is done solely to advance a political, religious, or otherwise ideological goal — twisting or ignoring the original work by, say, falsely identifying villains in it with one's political opponents, or mistranslating a "good" adjective as something more specific related to one's agenda, or even by simply mistranslating most or all of the text to make it a tract on one's views. Note that this isn't a mere mistake or simple unconscious bias — there is actual, conscious intent to make the translation fit one's views, regardless of what is said in the original text. Needless to say, fans, translators, and translator fans who realize what's going on get quite furious, with good reason. Sister Trope to Trolling Translator, which is when a translator deliberately mistranslates because it's amusing. Compare Twisting the Words, when this happens in the original language. |
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Reds (1981) | |
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| Translation with an Agenda / int_180976d7 | type |
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Julian Comstock. The Narrator finds a letter belonging to a dead Dutch soldier and asks one of his officers what written on it. The officer replies that the writer is saying how he hates Americans. The letter is actually the kind you'd expect form a soldier fighting overseas - telling his wife he misses her and griping about the lousy war and the weather. | |
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The English localization for the "Special Delivery" quest portrays Finley and Sasan's relationship as reciprocally romantic, something lacking in the Japanese version; and inserts entire sentences of dialogue in an attempt to justify the romance as being OK on the grounds of Finley (a Zora child) being older than Sasan (an adult Hylian). | |
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In The Saga of Tanya the Evil, the title character notices something strange in the translations of the Rus soldiers captured in the Imperial invasion of their territory, and has her second lieutenant, a Heroic Russian Émigré, to sit around one such interrogation and give her unbiased translation. Sure enough, the military translators are exaggerating the soldiers' hardline Communist leanings - whatever worry they have about the invasion has very little to do with political leanings. Irritated at how the translators are obsessively conflating the Rus people with Communism, she makes a private suggestion to her superiors to dispense with the Army's in-house translators and switch to Imperial scholars. | |
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The edition of Carmen prepared in 1964 by Fritz Oeser is notorious for not only restoring musical material deleted during or before the original rehearsals but also for liberally rewriting the stage directions to emphasize the OTP of Carmen and Escamillo. | |
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Tuuri Hotakainen of Stand Still, Stay Silent is the only member of the expedition who can translate Finnish. Her cousin Lalli doesn't speak anything but Finnish... and Tuuri has a history of dismissing Lalli's perspective when she wants him to go along with something. This affects how she conveys orders from Sigrun and translates his scouting reports | |
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The Last of the Mohicans has a heroic example. Several of the protagonists are captured by the Hurons after the British convoy is ambushed following the Battle of Fort William Henry. Chief Sachem initially wants to burn Colonel Munroe's daughter Cora to satisfy the grudge that Hurons, especially Huron war leader Magua have against Munroe, while making a point of sparing Munroe's other daughter Alice. At this point Hawkeye offers to die in her place but, not being able to speak French, he tells Duncan to translate this offer for him. Duncan deliberately ignores Hawkeye's demand, instead offering to trade himself for Cora. Sachem agrees to this. | |
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The English localization of Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness rewrites one dialogue exchange to include snark about the Cultural Translation and Always Male practices that were not hinted at in the source text. | |
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While the book has never been translated fully, at least some of the controversy regarding The Satanic Verses in the Arabic speaking world can be attributed to the fact that the title was sometimes deliberately translated using the word "ayat", which specifically means the verses of the Quran as opposed to its more general English title. | |
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Return Of The Obra Dinn: One of the flashbacks shows a sailor who only speakes Chinese being executed for murder, with the captain stating that he confessed to the crime. The very next flashback shows you that murder... and the killer is someone completely different. You later learn that there's one person on the ship who speaks both English and Chinese, and he was in collaboration with the actual murderer. The circumstances surrounding the Chinese sailor's death then become clear. | |
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Dragon Age: Inquisition: Solas speaks Elvish better than anyone else in the series (yes, including other elves), and occasionally mutters full sentences, instead of just peppering a word here and there like all the other elves do. If you ask what he said, his translations are always at least a little bit wrong. For example, at the Well of Sorrows, he tells Abelas "Malas Amelin ne Halam, Abelas." Solas tells the Inquisitor he hoped that Abelas would find a new name, since Abelas means "sorrow." It actually translates as "Now the blood is finished," a reference to the "blood writing" ancient elves used to identify themselves as slaves to their gods (and modern elves use as tribal markings). Downplayed with Iron Bull. When the Inquisitor finds out that his qunari name/rank is "Hisraad," Bull says that it translates as "weaver of illusions." Another qunari bluntly says that it just means "liar." |
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Star Trek: The Captain's Oath: During negotiations with the Agni, the translator, a Regulan-born who lost a friend during the Agni's recent attack, is persuaded by the war-hungry head of the planet's defense force to fudge the translation to make the Agni look hostile. Kirk soon spots that something's up, and she confesses, allowing them to fix things before it gets too far. | |
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The Italian dub of Flash Gordon (1980) adds one line about workers' strikes for no reason in particular. | |
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Discussed in Mafalda, where the main character ponders doing this as an UN translator so she can help achieve world peace. | |
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Scrubs: One time JD had a patient who only spoke German and asked the patient's brother to help him break some bad news about his prognosis, the brother instead told him everything was going to be fine, and JD was wondering why the patient was taking it so well until he repeated the brother's exact words to Elliot (who speaks German). In another instance Elliot trolls Dr. Cox when he (in his regular dismissive manner) asks her for a German translation of some medical info ("your lungs have fluid in them") to relay to a patient. She gives him a German phrase that means "Your wife has great tits." As an added bonus, this is said while Cox thinks he is miming a pair of lungs. |
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The Devil's Dictionary defines an interpreter as "one who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said". | |
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The SCP Foundation file SCP-140 describes a Tome of Eldritch Lore chronicling an Always Chaotic Evil Empire, the Daevites, whose history is laden with insanely horrible Black Magic and slavery, which seems to be struggling to become real again after being Ret-Gone. SCP-6140 turns this on its head, revealing 140's author as Thomas Bruce, a single racist British man, who heard a few nasty incidents about the real SCP-6140 (a perfectly normal nation renowned mostly for its agricultural techniques but carrying an unfortunately unsavory history), and decided they were like that all the time. He then used a bit of magic to delete the whole country from history so his book would be the only available chronicle. The truth comes out when all copies of SCP-140 are destroyed... and the real Daevastan comes back. The Foundation reclassifies the file, admitting they were wrong, making the whole thing public to all Foundation staff, and asks everyone to use the proper names and make an effort to reconcile the realities to quash Bruce's racist diatribe for good. | |
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Garfield is probably one of the least politically charged comic strips in existence. Despite this, one Norwegian translation team that worked on it back in the 80's kept insisting that Straw Loser Jon subscribes to Klassekampen, a well-known left-wing newspaper. | |
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Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, Gaspode the Wonder Dog helps Carrot question a rescued wolf, but in the process casts Carrot as a wolf-hating psycho who has poisoned the chicken he's offering as a bribe. | |
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The Italian dub of Monty Python and the Holy Grail has replaced the humour with near-incomprehensible political jokes. | |
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MAD The magazine ran a series of Newspaper Comic strips which had been (allegedly) adapted by the Soviet Union, re-translated into English, which had the various characters bemoaning their fates or otherwise delivering very unsubtle stabs at the American Way. For example, in a Peanuts Halloween strip which showed the kids going Trick or Treating, the speeches were changed to the kids having to go begging door to door to get something to eat and being so embarrassed by having to do so that they dress in costumes so nobody will see their shame. There was a "Mad Look At" strip where a man was speaking at a political rally with someone translating into Sign Language. Everyone in the room gets offended. The last panel is the interpretor being paid by the man's opponent. |
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The English translation of World Heroes 2 adds an extra sentence to the end of Neo Geegus's victory line, turning it into a political joke: | |
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Another scene that is translated to be more romantic is them sharing paopu fruit. In Japanese, Kairi says, "This charm will make sure we won’t be separated (again)." And in English, she says, "I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That’s all." The latter has clear romantic connotations, while the former could very well be read as simply platonic, in the same vein of Kairi giving Sora her Wayfinder back in the original Kingdom Hearts. | |
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In Kingdom Hearts χ, the Arc Words "We'll go together" were seemingly mistranslated as "We'll make those dreams come true, Belle", in a scene very clearly paralleling Belle and the Beast (now the Prince) with Sora and Riku.note This isn't the first time the parallel has appeared, by the way. | |
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In X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar, Wedge Antilles and a few of his squadmates have been roped into a diplomatic mission to the neutral world of Adumar, whose Hat is an obsession with fighter pilots killing each other for honor points. The locals speak enough Basic for Wedge and the others to get by, but he still relies heavily on his diplomatic advisor to navigate any cultural issues. Said advisor gets increasingly irritated with Wedge for not engaging in lethal duels with the natives like the Imperial delegation is doing, until Wedge accuses him of overstepping his authority for the sake of the mission. Things come to a head when their host country's leader declares himself ruler of the whole planet and asks for the foreign pilots' assistance bringing the rest of the world to heel — Wedge of course refuses, and the diplomat hurries over to try to phrase things more politely. But instead the diplomat tells the local ruler a sob story about Wedge dearly wanting to aid him in his war of conquest, but being trapped by his other obligations, with an honorable death in battle his only escape. So the ruler declares Wedge and the other New Republic pilots fugitives, making them fair game for anyone out to earn some personal honor by murdering them, and forcing the heroes to fight their way to safety. | |
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Warlock of Gramarye: In A Wizard in Chaos, a boss' steward is deliberately mistranslating prices quoted by merchants and taking the excess. This lands him in trouble when the protagonist, a telepath, shows up. | |
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Isaiah has many examples, as many translators over the centuries have found it irresistible to retroactively tinker with the prophecies to fit Christian dogma a little better. For example, the Hebrew uses the word messiah to refer to both the prophecised Messiah and King Cyrus of Persia, a ruler popular with the Jewish population for encouraging freedom of religion, but many translations choose to Translate the Loanwords, Too when referring unambiguously to Cyrus, calling him 'the one anointed by God', while using the loan word in all other cases. | |
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Mass Effect: Averted, but the aversion itself is an agenda. The normally-insular Batarian Hegemony makes a point of providing up-to-date glossaries and language rules to the rest of the galaxy, in order to facilitate the spread of their propaganda. | |
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In Gunnerkrigg Court, we have Zimmy, who translates for the Polish-speaking Gamma. Zimmy has a tendency to "translate" a lot of what other people say into insults, to prevent Gamma from making friends with anyone else, and thus keep her around. | |
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Denial: One of the many things Deborah Lipstadt accuses David Irving of is that he does this with documents from Nazi Germany to push forward his claim that the Holocaust never happened. She gets in touch with another historian that also knows German to prove her point during the trial. | |
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A Brazilian localization of a Batman comic had the variety that adds political bias. The translator translated "Nasty", a general insult, as a specific political slur regarding people of a certain Brazilian political party. Since the editor responsible is affiliated with a magazine well-known in Brazil for utterly hating said political party and since there's several simpler ways to translate the word into Portuguese it's clear that this trope was in play. | |
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Their dub of My First Girlfriend Is a Gal completely rewrote the context of episode 7 to make it a Take That! towards Donald Trump and Visual Novel fans, with the latter in particular being dismissed as misogynists. | |
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Notoriously, a Gamergate reference in their Prison School simuldub was ultimately removed for the home release. | |
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Under the Sun: Olaf is an illiterate farmer, who has fallen in love with his housekeeper Ellen, who turns out to be secretly married. Ellen, who does not know that Olaf is illiterate, leaves a good-bye note in which she confesses that she's married, proclaims her love for him, and says she'll sort things out. Olaf gives the note to his friend Erik to read. Erik, jealous of the Olaf-Ellen romance, maliciously makes up a completely different message, pretending that the note says Erik gave her money to pay off a debt and she left with it, and leaving out the declaration of love. | |
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In Alone, Together the main characters Danni and Jerom are soldiers from two different nations that were recently at war stranded on an island together, neither speaks the other's native tongue and Danni never heard that the war ended. Eventually some pirates come by and Jerom speaks to them in an island trade language, asking one who speaks Danni's language to tell her that the war is over. The pirate tells her that the war is still going on. However, she happens to speak the trade language. | |
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In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the HK-50 droids masquerade as protocol droids (who among other things work as translators) to spread anarchy and war by ruining diplomatic confrontations. Judging by some of the cut content (where you see the place they're manufactured and trained), they are not at all subtle about it, often opening conversations with vile insults and overt threats they attribute to their "masters". | |
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The Song of Songs has a controversy over a line from the Beloved that would be literally translated from Hebrew as "I am black and beautiful". Many translations change it to something along the lines of "although I am black, I am beautiful". The context of the scene is that the Beloved is tanned dark because her brothers have forced her to work in the sun all day, thus changing her to be against Hebrew beauty standards, making this change a little less offensive; but the Hebrew had her insisting her black skin was a part of her beauty, while many translations made in times of racism and colorism had her claim her beauty despite her dark skin. | |
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1 Samuel 20 writes that David and Jonathan kissed and wept when they had to say goodbye to one another. A kiss would not have been an unusual gesture between two friends in a tender moment in that place and time period, so most translations leave it in. However, many conservative modern translations specify that the two friends kissed each other's cheeks—a detail not mentioned in the original Hebrew—to avoid mental imagery the translators considered problematic. The Living Bible goes further, and dispenses with translation issues altogether by simply bowdlerising the passage to "and they sadly shook hands". | |
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Ecclesiastes 11:2 is usually translated along the lines of "Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth" (ESV), one of many times the Bible urges those with wealth to spend it supporting the community. The NIV translates it as "Invest in seven ventures, yes, in eight; you do not know what disaster may come upon the land" and continues the verse by urging people to diversify a stock portfolio. It goes without saying that the particular economic system being justified there did not exist at the pre-feudal time Ecclesiastes was written, and would, in fact, have been considered sinful under Old Testament money handling laws. The NIV is an American translation from the Cold War era, so imagining King Solomon as a wise investor rather than as a wise man of generosity had a political motivation. | |
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The simuldub of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid changed a line from, | |
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Discotek Media's official release of the Lovely★Complex anime accepted unpaid volunteer work from a freelance translator, who introduced a lot of changes into the dub, which the translator described at length in a public blog post. Apart from "making things less transphobic" (by heavily rewriting parts of the story relating to the male-to-female transgender character Seiko), the changes made in his draft included rewriting/interpreting the lead characters Risa and Otani as "a psychopath who doesn't understand empathy" and "being in a cycle of abuse without realizing it", respectively. Fans were not happy when these motivations for script changes were revealed, and Discotek released a statement with an apology, distancing themselves from the translator's actions. | |
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Doctor Who: In "Planet of the Ood", the slavers' presentation reveals that they offer a selection of translation devices to make the eponymous race's speech conform to what their masters want to hear, thus creating the illusion of Happiness in Slavery. | |
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The first German translator Rolf Kauka of the Asterix comics in the 1960s, under the name Siggi und Babarras, made a few rather controversial changes. The little village in Brittany was moved to the Rhine and renamed "Bonhalla" (a pun on the German capital Bonn and Walhalla), the Roman occupiers from Natolien spoke with an American accent, the Goths spoke in red letters to imply that they were Dirty Communists, and there were frequent references to German politics (both West and East). The translation generally had a rather right-wing slant. Goscinny and Uderzo were not amused and terminated their contract with Kauka and commissioned a new, more faithful and much beloved translation. Kauka would go on to publish his own comic series Fritze Blitz and Dunnerkiel, which was clearly inspired by Asterix. | |
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Star Wars Rebels: Done by Sabine Wren in "Droids in Distress". When asked to translate an Aqualish merchant's words into Basic for the benefit of Imperial minister Maketh Tua (after first arranging for her translation droid to be removed), Sabine mostly translates faithfully, but doctors the translation to give the wrong docking bay where the MacGuffin is stored, so they have time to steal it themselves. | |
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Planet of Adventure. The Wankhmen, humans who are a Servant Race of the alien Wankh, have been doing this for centuries to maintain their privileged position. The Wankh have little interest in local affairs as they're just on the planet to keep an eye on their enemies the Dirdir, and the Wankhmen make sure that no-one else has a chance to learn the complex musical language of their masters. Being the sole conduit for information, they're able to play up the threat from the Dirdir as being much worse than it is, so the Wankh will maintain their military bases on the planet. | |
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Another from Brazil: in an issue of Daredevil where Kingpin was elected mayor of New York on a populist platform with a lot of fake news the editor translated the phrase "Fisk rules" on the sign of one of his voters as "Fisk mito". "Mito" (meaning "myth") is a well-known nickname for Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right Brazilian president who is often accused of having been elected by riding a populist wave and spreading fake news. | |
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An episode of Into the West sees a dispute over a cattle between some Mormon caravaners and a local Lakota village. When US troops arrive to settle the dispute, they find that the only person who can speak Lakota and English is a drunk scout who intentionally mistranslates what the Lakota chief is saying to portray them as more belligerent than they are. The Lakota know something is amiss but can't get their point across to the officer in charge. The whole situation ends with the massacre of the Lakota village. | |
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There is an old German dub from the 1950s of Casablanca, which bizarrely excises all references to Nazism and cuts those scenes that would have been obvious even without the dialogue. Thankfully a later dub was made that is more faithful to the original. | |
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Maria Davanah Headley's translation of Beowulf is a consciously feminist take on a classical poem, and she took some liberties in her translation to give the text a feminist slant. Most obviously, Grendel's mother, usually assumed to be a hideous monster like Grendel himself (based on the ambiguous term "aglæca", a word used to describe Grendel, his mother, and other monsters), is spoken of simply as a ferocious warrior woman (based on the fact that Beowulf, definitely human, is also described as "aglæca" at two points in the poem). | |
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Kingdom Hearts III has many scenes between Sora and Kairi affected by this: Near the end of the game Kairi manages to help keep Sora from fading away when his and their companions' lives are endangered. In Japanese, Sora recognizes how strong Kairi really is for doing this (as no one else had managed to maintain themselves, let alone themself and another person), and says, "Yappari tsuyoi na, Kairi wa!" (You're strong, Kairi, just as I thought!) In English, either as a mistake or as a misguided attempt to provide some more Ship Tease between the two, Sora tells Kairi that he feels strong when he's with her. Unfortunately, this only serves to downplay a rare moment of Kairi showing off her capabilities, and denies Sora a chance to acknowledge them. It's also possible this was done due to Kairi being a more divisive character in the West and the Western views of strength being more... "masculine". As a result, a rather vocal portion of the fanbase tends to view Kairi as a Damsel Scrappy. The translators may have assumed the original line was going to stoke up some ire from Western players and went with a line that still managed to fit the situation. Another scene that is translated to be more romantic is them sharing paopu fruit. In Japanese, Kairi says, "This charm will make sure we won’t be separated (again)." And in English, she says, "I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That’s all." The latter has clear romantic connotations, while the former could very well be read as simply platonic, in the same vein of Kairi giving Sora her Wayfinder back in the original Kingdom Hearts. Yet another scene is translated to be more romantic, this time at the end of the game when Sora gives his speech about getting Kairi back. In Japanese, he says, "This time for sure I expected we could go home together… but Kairi wasn’t in this place (realm)." Meanwhile, in English, he says, "I thought we’d finally be together. But she’s out there, alone." And clearly there's a very big difference between coming home together and being together. The original Japanese dialogue of Sora's conversation with the Nameless Star more or less confirms that while Kairi is the reason Sora retains his body, Riku is the reason his heart survived. Meanwhile, in English, Riku's role in saving Sora is somewhat... downplayed. |
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A random event in Stellaris can have an ambassador's Translator Microbes hacked by an outside faction in a bid to damage relations between two empires. In this case, it is not so much the translator who has an agenda but the people putting words in the translator's mouth. | |
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Star Wars Legends: The Essential Guide to Droids stated that Cybot Galactica's 3P0-series protocol droids actually had to have creativity dampeners installed to keep them from unnecessarily embroidering their translations. In X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar, Wedge Antilles and a few of his squadmates have been roped into a diplomatic mission to the neutral world of Adumar, whose Hat is an obsession with fighter pilots killing each other for honor points. The locals speak enough Basic for Wedge and the others to get by, but he still relies heavily on his diplomatic advisor to navigate any cultural issues. Said advisor gets increasingly irritated with Wedge for not engaging in lethal duels with the natives like the Imperial delegation is doing, until Wedge accuses him of overstepping his authority for the sake of the mission. Things come to a head when their host country's leader declares himself ruler of the whole planet and asks for the foreign pilots' assistance bringing the rest of the world to heel — Wedge of course refuses, and the diplomat hurries over to try to phrase things more politely. But instead the diplomat tells the local ruler a sob story about Wedge dearly wanting to aid him in his war of conquest, but being trapped by his other obligations, with an honorable death in battle his only escape. So the ruler declares Wedge and the other New Republic pilots fugitives, making them fair game for anyone out to earn some personal honor by murdering them, and forcing the heroes to fight their way to safety. |
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Bernal Diaz's The True History of the Conquest of Mexico provides both a straight and a meta example of this trope. It is a first-hand account and memoir of Cortez's expedition to Mexico - written by a senior NCO who spent most of his time hanging out with the translators and infantry. It presents a much earthier version of the incidents than Cortez's official history. In addition to mentioning a few times where the translators (who were often pulled from rival tribes) pulled off this trope against Cortez or their rivals with varying degrees of success, the book itself fell victim as well. The original manuscript copy was filed in the government archives in Peru, and prepared for print after Diaz's death by a Mercredian friar. Who promptly took the opportunity to insert Mercredians into major historical events, alter the sizes and timings of battles to make them seem more important, and the like. The original text was only found and correctly translated in the 1990s. | |
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In a rare heroic example, the translator from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Greek Interpreter" exploited the kidnappers' ignorance of Greek, questioning their prisoner about the circumstances of his captivity while they thought he was interrogating him about things they wanted to know. | |
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In the English and Chinese localizations of Ghostwire: Tokyo, one line of dialogue said by KK in the original Japanese dialog, where he vaguely replies with some form of "who knows, really" in response to Akito asking if the bow he was holding had been obtained by theft, was replaced with a political "all property is theft, kid." (EN) and "The world belongs to the people" (CN)◊. Notably, Bethesda responded to the backlash in the Spider's Thread update a year later by having both lines rewritten and re-recorded so that it's closer to the original. | |
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Kingdom Hearts: In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, there's very heavy subtext in the original dialogue, thanks to specific pronoun use, that the person most special to Sora that Naminé is replacing in his memories isn't in fact Kairi, but Riku. When Sora meets the other kids in his memory of the Destiny Islands, the pronoun they use for his 'special person' is aitsu (アイツ). The pronoun is casual and gender neutral but more masculine leaning (think of referring to someone as 'guy', regardless of gender), and it's generally considered rude/insulting to use the pronoun towards a girl. When Sora realizes Naminé has been tampering with his memories, she uses neutral pronouns to describe the person most special to him. However, in both Japanese and English, Sora assumes she means Kairi. But the full extent of Sora's misunderstanding is all but lost in the English translation, as it translates aitsu to feminine pronouns. In fact, the last time Sora sees the Riku Replica, he refers to him by aitsu in Japanese, but in English, just calls out his name instead. There is an attempt in the English translation of the Chain of Memories novel to rectify this at least, as the subtext from the game is mostly preserved, while also going further and implying that the memory of the meteor shower promise Naminé tampers with was actually between Sora and Riku. You can read about it in more detail here. In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora also uses aitsu to refer to Riku, when he sees him at the top of the mountain in The Land of Dragons. This time, it's translated more accurately to "That guy..." Kingdom Hearts III: In the original Japanese dialogue, when Riku and Mickey are in the Dark World for the first time, Mickey says Riku has found the strength to protect his 'precious person' (taisetsu na hito), very obviously implied to be Sora. This scene comes directly after one with Hercules saying Megara is his own precious person. After a flashback of receiving the Keyblade from Terra, Riku then says to himself, "(Is this) the strength to protect the person most precious to me...?" However, in the English dub, Mickey and Riku both say the 'things that matter' instead, while Hercules says 'the person I love most' about Megara, so the parallel and implication are completely lost (even if we as the audience can still deciper that Sora is the reason for Riku's growth and character development). To top it off, the KH3 Ultimania entry about Riku also uses precious 'person' instead of 'things'. It seems Riku's wish has deliberately evolved from when he was a child, but that important bit of character development got no homoed out of several different official KHIII English translations. Taisetsu (precious/cherished) is once again used during a scene with Sora and Riku. In Japanese, Sora says, "You really cherish Elsa...", when speaking with Anna in Arendelle, while in English he says, "I'm sure she knows how much you love her." Sora then thinks to himself in Japanese, "It's the same as when Riku disappeared before. It's surely because he cherishes me that he wouldn't let us be together." In English, it's translated as "It's just like when Riku disappeared. He thought he had to push me away, to protect me." This means taisetsu has been translated twice to 'love' in English... except for when it comes to how Riku feels about Sora. When visiting the video game store at Galaxy Toys, Sora sees Yozora (the character Rex thinks he's a toy of) for the first time and says, "Well, I never looked this good." And... Yozora looks exactly like Riku. Which Sora acknowledges himself in a social media post.◊ As it turns out, in Japanese, Donald actually says "Very good-looking, huh." after Goofy says Yozora looks like Riku. Given the context, he's teasing Sora about saying someone who looks like Riku is good-looking. But, once again, it seems to have been mistranslated that the subject is Sora in English. Also, in the original Japanese text of the aforementioned social media post, Sora says he feels a connection to Yozora because he looks like Riku. Kingdom Hearts III has many scenes between Sora and Kairi affected by this: Near the end of the game Kairi manages to help keep Sora from fading away when his and their companions' lives are endangered. In Japanese, Sora recognizes how strong Kairi really is for doing this (as no one else had managed to maintain themselves, let alone themself and another person), and says, "Yappari tsuyoi na, Kairi wa!" (You're strong, Kairi, just as I thought!) In English, either as a mistake or as a misguided attempt to provide some more Ship Tease between the two, Sora tells Kairi that he feels strong when he's with her. Unfortunately, this only serves to downplay a rare moment of Kairi showing off her capabilities, and denies Sora a chance to acknowledge them. It's also possible this was done due to Kairi being a more divisive character in the West and the Western views of strength being more... "masculine". As a result, a rather vocal portion of the fanbase tends to view Kairi as a Damsel Scrappy. The translators may have assumed the original line was going to stoke up some ire from Western players and went with a line that still managed to fit the situation. Another scene that is translated to be more romantic is them sharing paopu fruit. In Japanese, Kairi says, "This charm will make sure we won’t be separated (again)." And in English, she says, "I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That’s all." The latter has clear romantic connotations, while the former could very well be read as simply platonic, in the same vein of Kairi giving Sora her Wayfinder back in the original Kingdom Hearts. Yet another scene is translated to be more romantic, this time at the end of the game when Sora gives his speech about getting Kairi back. In Japanese, he says, "This time for sure I expected we could go home together… but Kairi wasn’t in this place (realm)." Meanwhile, in English, he says, "I thought we’d finally be together. But she’s out there, alone." And clearly there's a very big difference between coming home together and being together. The original Japanese dialogue of Sora's conversation with the Nameless Star more or less confirms that while Kairi is the reason Sora retains his body, Riku is the reason his heart survived. Meanwhile, in English, Riku's role in saving Sora is somewhat... downplayed. In Kingdom Hearts χ, the Arc Words "We'll go together" were seemingly mistranslated as "We'll make those dreams come true, Belle", in a scene very clearly paralleling Belle and the Beast (now the Prince) with Sora and Riku.note This isn't the first time the parallel has appeared, by the way. |
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One episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day names the Translation with an Agenda process "Harry Bosco" after an In-Universe example. In this episode, figuring out what was actually said before the translation was Harry Boscoed is a major plot point. | |
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In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, there's very heavy subtext in the original dialogue, thanks to specific pronoun use, that the person most special to Sora that Naminé is replacing in his memories isn't in fact Kairi, but Riku. When Sora meets the other kids in his memory of the Destiny Islands, the pronoun they use for his 'special person' is aitsu (アイツ). The pronoun is casual and gender neutral but more masculine leaning (think of referring to someone as 'guy', regardless of gender), and it's generally considered rude/insulting to use the pronoun towards a girl. When Sora realizes Naminé has been tampering with his memories, she uses neutral pronouns to describe the person most special to him. However, in both Japanese and English, Sora assumes she means Kairi. But the full extent of Sora's misunderstanding is all but lost in the English translation, as it translates aitsu to feminine pronouns. In fact, the last time Sora sees the Riku Replica, he refers to him by aitsu in Japanese, but in English, just calls out his name instead. There is an attempt in the English translation of the Chain of Memories novel to rectify this at least, as the subtext from the game is mostly preserved, while also going further and implying that the memory of the meteor shower promise Naminé tampers with was actually between Sora and Riku. You can read about it in more detail here. In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora also uses aitsu to refer to Riku, when he sees him at the top of the mountain in The Land of Dragons. This time, it's translated more accurately to "That guy..." | |
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