Blind Idiot Translation/Film

The pictures moving around (Film)

"Jack: We must eat Soyabean Cake!
 * Die Hard
 * A bootleg copy of Die Hard 4. (from Indonesian dub) had every third sentence in the dialogue somehow replaced with the word 'Soya Bean cake', which sounded ridiculous to many viewers reading the subtitles, eg:

Phone operator: I'm about die, Jack, but the Terrorists is are to blow up about the whole plane! We is about to only 3 seconds to do this.

Jack: Dial up now the agency, for we are about to blow up teh 'Soyabean cake'!"

"It's over Anakin! The Geography I stands compares you superior!''"
 * Fugitive Alien
 * Several dials/meters on the Bacchus 3 are labeled hilarious things, such as: Space Speed, Cabin Air Presser, Tenperature, Sunny Side, and Other Side.
 * Or the members of the Bacchus 3 wearing jumpsuits emblazoned with the badge "Security Guard".
 * The computer actually shows a shipping manifest.
 * Found in the Danish extended version DVD of the Terminator 2: Judgement Day film. When Sarah Connor is about to smash the Terminator's chip John stops her, saying that they need the Terminator's help. The word "need" can be translated into Danish in different ways, depending on whether the need is practical or mental. The translator chose the word implying mental need, which then implied that John's need of the Terminator is of sexual nature.
 * When the T1000 disguised as Sarah Connor calls to John, and John realizes it's actually the 1000 he calls onto the actual Sarah to 'SHOOT!' The Dutch subtitles of some versions of the movie translated it as 'damn it!'
 * That one actually kind of makes sense. It's likely the writers of the sub misinterpreted the context of the line and chose to translate the euphemistic use of the word (as a replacement for harsher language), for which "damn it" would be a decent equivalent.
 * Found in Good Morning People, a student film shown at 2008 Asian American Showcase. Most of the spoken lines were in Japanese, with subtitles translating it literally, keeping the Japanese grammar and sentence construction intact.
 * When the remade versions of the Star Wars films were shown in Norway, the subtitles were really badly translated. The most widely known example is that the word "lightsabre" was translated as "lettsabel", which does, in fact, mean "light sabre", as in the opposite of a heavy sabre. In Attack of the Clones, "you will be invincible" was translated as "you will be invisible". The very same movie had the phrase "Let the execution begin" end up as "Let the excursion begin".
 * In the first French dub of Star Wars, Darth Vader is refered to as "Dark Invader." Obviously the translators caught on to this and edited it to "Dark Vador" rather than use the original name. Much later, the original name was finally used in the French-Canadian dub of Episode III, which ironically had Blind Idiot Translations of its own ("thousands of star systems of the Republic" translated to "thousands of galaxy of the Republic").
 * "DO NOT WANT!"
 * One infamous Russian translation of the Back to The Future 2 scene with the multiple "You are FIRED!" faxes goes "You were burned". Marty is a spy?
 * And exactly the same mistake was made in Russian translation of Robo Cop. Making Robocop shooting the bad guy rather... nonsensical.
 * In the Italian dub of all the Back to The Future movies, the Flux Capacitor is always translated as "flusso canalizzatore", literally "Canalizer Flux" or "Channelizer Flux."
 * Another Russian gem, this time from a forgettable romantic comedy: The Scarlet Letter gets translated as "Scarlett's Letter". You know, as in the thing you mail. Which renders the subsequent appearance of the red letter "A" nonsensical.
 * One of the early Russian dubs of Star Wars: A New Hope gave us a character called "Obi-Odin" (Russian for Obi-1). Guess who was that.
 * To be fair, it's a made-up name alongside named like R2-D2 and C-3PO. It's not much of a stretch to assume (just based on hearing it) that "Wan" is "One", especially since they mention clones at some point.
 * Another famous Norwegian translation mistake is the line "It's not a motorcycle, it's a chopper" from Pulp Fiction, translated as "It's not a motorcycle, it's a helicopter" in Norwegian.
 * Then there is Star War: Backstroke of the West, a bootleg version of Revenge of the Sith, translated to Chinese, with English subtitles. But in writing the subtitles, they didn't write it in the original English - No, they retranslated the Chinese back into English. Hilarity ensued. Big No? Do Not Want!

"Do you fuck on I?''"
 * Especially funny in every instance involving elephants. And using the F-word as a replacement for "work" or "do."

"Frank Corvin: "Let me tell you something, my dear. Those instructions were written by a fellow in Japan when they made this damn thing. They were probably translated by some gringo who was an expatriate American that couldn't get a job in this country. And then the Japanese guy probably translated him just to double check on him. You don't need these instructions. Not at all. Tear them up.""
 * Other gems involve translating 'Jedi Council' as 'Presbyterian Church' and one of the Red Shirt pilots in the opening sequence getting the line "He is in my behind!"
 * A few years ago, a major restoration of Metropolis was released to DVD. In the restoration all the intertitles and in-film text was translated from German to English, including the shot of Freder reading from the "Boot of Revelations". Nice job, Kino.
 * Shoot Em Up. When Mr. Hertz first meets hooker Monica Belucci's character he insults her in Italian, orginially using a phrase that had been translated via Babelfish. A rather confused Monica had to provide a more accurate version.
 * Space Cowboys gave us:

""I want a chaff cutter. Now!"
 * A few further gems from Norwegian: "Lettsverd", from Star Wars: Episode IV. It means "Light-sword", as in the opposite of "heavy". Then there's the Light Cycle Grid from Tron, which became "Lyssyklusmatrisen", "Light cycle matrix" - as in "something which repeats itself", rather than "bike".
 * (We interrupt this unbroken paragraph to note irony): they translated it right. Unfortunately the play on words didn't go with. "lightcycle" was originally one of many test program's to check the LEDs (or earlier incandescent bulbs) on old computers. It would cycle through the lights. The word for the trail-wall leaving laser motorbikes was a pun on this program name. Presumably had there been a command for initiating machine learning the solar sailer demo Flynn hijacked might have been a locomotive instead, playing off of "train."
 * Sometimes, editors get too eager, leading "Fuck you, you motherfucking fuckers!" to be translated into Norwegian as "No lyt dykk roa dykk ned, gutar" - "You might want to calm down, boys". In Friends, "make-up sex" was translated into "sminkesex", leading viewers confused as to what rouge and lipstick have to do with sex. In one movie, the reassuring "I'll be right behind you, watching your back" becomes a moderately creepy "I'm standing behind you, looking at your back". "The Yellow Brick Road" became "That Road Which Is Paved With Yellow Cobblings". "One day, you will be invincible" became "One day, you will be invisible". However, probably one of the worst was from Apollo13 - "Go for launch!" became "Gå til lunsj", meaning... "Go to lunch".
 * On the back of the Swedish DVD of the Sin City film, it says that the film is based on the work of "comedy book author" Frank Miller, an obvious failure to get what "comic book" means. (For the record, the correct Swedish word for "comic" is serie, literally "series".)
 * During one of the audio commentaries on Pirates of the Caribbean, there's a discussion about the sores on Jack Sparrow's face. In the Swedish DVD translation, however, "the scab" is translated into "strejkbrytaren", i.e. strike-breaker. Technically a correct translation, but completely nonsensical in context.
 * In the Japanese edition of Sukeban Deka: Codename = Asamiya Saki (otherwise known in the West as Yo-Yo Girl Cop), the English subtitles seem to have been generated by attempting to translate the individual words directly into English, including the names, causing it to veer between this trope and a Translation Train Wreck. The seemingly meaningless phrase "of temple" keeps recurring in the dialogue -- baffling, until you realise this was a translation of Asamiya, the heroine's family name.
 * Finnish TV subtitles for Shaft once had a very literal translation for "Shaft is a bad motha".
 * Similarly, the legendary mistranslation of "Must be another drill" in the Finnish TV broadcast of Star Wars as "Ehkä se on pora," referring to the hole-making tool rather than a training routine.
 * In the trench run sequence, "Switch all power to front deflector screens" became "Switch front projection (monitor) screens to full power".
 * Also, instead of the usual existing translations for blasters and the Force, there was whammers and the Might. That was a conscious (and bad) choice by the translator, though.
 * In one of the James Bond movies, the Silicon Valley is mentioned. The German dub confused it with silicone.
 * The German word for silicone is Silikon while the German word for silicon is Silizium. As you may expect these words are often mixed up in translations.
 * The Brazilian dub of Tropic Thunder turns "I am a lead farmer" into "I'm the leader of the farm".
 * The official theatrical Swedish subtitling for Transformers 2 consistently translated "the sliver" (as in the small shart of the Allspark) to "silvret", meaning "the silver".
 * The Norwegian movie subtitles for the LotR movies were so hilariously bad that they were changed in the DVD versions. Not because they were Blind Idiot Translations, but because they were so archaic that the audience quite simply started laughing. Elrond's "Kast den inn i eldmørja!" ("Cast it into the fire!", but really leaning more towards "Cast it into the sea of flames-infernal!") and Théoden's "Mitt kjøde er knust" ("My body is broken", but really more like "My corpus is undone") are both still buzzwords.
 * The Return of the King, airing on Norwegian television a while back, had subtitles that made several really ridiculous mistakes, like having Gollum consistently refer to Frodo as "Husband" rather than "Master", or Sam's whole "I can't carry it for you but I can carry you!"-scene being translated into "Så la oss dra av sted med den, en gang for alle! Jeg kan ikke bære den til deg, men jeg kan bære deg!" ... Which, incidentally, means "Then let us get going with it, once and for all! I can't carry it to you, but I can carry you!"
 * The Japanese subtitles were also pretty infamous. Fan complaints resulted in the translator being replaced for the next movie.
 * Battle Royale is quite notorious for having a few bootlegs with bad subtitles. People in North America have often had to turn to bootlegs since the film doesn't have a US distributor. The most notorious boot is a Korean DVD with some hilariously bad translation errors. Some priceless examples include "That were my friends!!!", "Anyone who sees this must be scribble", "That knife I stabed with you, sometimes I think I threw it away, but now it's my treasure" and lots more.
 * The English language track in Drunken Master contains a threat "I'll see you sink in hellfire!" that probably sounds more menacing in the original Chinese.
 * Many years ago, a short press article on the poor quality of Polish film translations had two outrageous examples: a phrase "The computer is down" was translated into "The computer is in the basement", and W.C. Fields was changed into "Toilet Pastures".
 * The otherwise decent Québec translation of Children of Men had a silly case of this with the subtitles. Early on, one of the governement's propaganda spot flash "Only Britain Soldiers On", the translator interpreted the line strangely literally and translated it as "Seul L'Angleterre a des soldats à bord" ("Only Britain has soldiers onboard").
 * The Latin American translation for Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone is RIDDLED with awful translation errors which confuse viewers to the point they don't understand the movie at all. For instance, they translated the movie directly from the British version but they kept the American title, so while the movie is titled "The Philosopher's Stone", the titular item is referred throughout the movie as "The Sorcerer's Stone".
 * One particularly jarring example comes in the scene where Professor McGonagall punishes the kids for nightstrolling. She says something along the lines of "Todos serán castigados", which means "You'll all be punished", to which Draco responds "Disculpe, creí escuchar que dijo ¿'los cuatro'?", which means "I'm sorry, I thought I heard you said 'the four of us'?", leaving the audience to say "Uh... no, she didn't, pal". Clearly she DID say "the four of you" in the original, but this translation was so terrible that TWO CONSECUTIVE LINES which referred to THE SAME SUBJECT were translated differently and made no sense while put together.
 * An official Hungarian subtitle for the first Robo Cop movie somehow came upon the brilliant realization that the word "chopper" can also be translated as "szecskavágó" (chaff cutter), aside from its usual bland translation, "helikopter". This lead to the following lines:

"I will board the chaff cutter with my hostage.""


 * In the Swedish DVD bonous material for The Lord of the Rings the camera showed one of the staff at the Weta Workshop creating a chainmail prop for the movie and commenting "This is chainmail." This was translated in the subtitles as "Detta är ett kedjebrev" meaning "This is a chain letter" instead of correct "Denna är en ringbrynja".
 * This happens in-universe with the 2009 Japanese film, Fish Story. An English-language novel is translated into Japanese by someone with no grasp of the language, and as a result, his word-by-word translation borders on Translation Train Wreck. The original opening phrase of the book is, "My own solitary fish story may scare a whale in its size and ferocity." The translation ends up, "The story of my solitude. If my solitude were a fish, it'd be so enormous, so militant, a whale would get out of there.
 * Russian bootleg translation of Beowulf (1999) was titled "Biovolk", i.e., "Biological Wolf".
 * Journey 2: The Mysterious Island was directly translated as Viaje 2: La Isla Misteriosa in the Latin American version, while still technically correct, it completely misses the Letters 2 Numbers factor, as the "two-to" homonym doesn't hold true in Spanish.
 * A unusual example of a country completely butchering its own subtitles is Repo the Genetic Opera, which came with some hilariously misquoted subtitles such as "I'll man his grave" instead of "on Marni's grave".
 * The particularly memorable: "Penile tissue, inch by inch..." and "I can't read!"
 * "YOU'VE TURNED THIS HOUSE INTO A ZOO!"
 * Two gems from the finnish translations of Batman DVD Extras:
 * Batman Forever: The Riddler is referred to as "Jokeri". This Batman enthusiast was very upset.
 * Batman and Robin: "My writers created Bane, I had little bit to do with it, mostly as a guy who was in the room with them" becomes "They created Bane to resemble an average roommate."
 * The swedish version of Fist of Fury is quite badly translated. Notable is the line "This time you're eating paper, but the next time you'll be eating glass" which becomes "Den här gången äter ni papper, men nästa gång blir det glass". "Glass" is the swedish word for ice-cream...
 * Yet another Swedish example: The Swedish subtitles for Kick-Ass translate "coke" (as in the slang word for "cocaine") as "cola", leading to some hilarious scenes of big bad criminals worrying about someone stealing their pop.
 * In the English subs for Jean Luc Godard's Une Femme est une femme, the French words verre and vert were confused by the translator, so "a glass of coffee" becomes "green coffee." (The French sometimes order coffee in a glass when they're in a hurry -- it cools quicker.)