Dream Tropes Wiki/"Blind Idiot" Translation

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A "Blind Idiot" Translation is a translation from one language to another where the translation is overly literal, grammatically incorrect, very awkward, or clearly misses what the word or phrase was supposed to mean. If a translation is complete gibberish, it is a Translation Train Wreck. Sometimes overlaps with Gratuitous Foreign Language.

The problems with "blind idiot" translations can be so bad that such translations can be prohibited. California State Law prohibits translating the phrase "notary public" into Spanish as "notario publico" (California Government Code, § 8219.5 (c)), because instead of translating into "someone who can authenticate signatures and take oaths", the phrase translates into "government official".

The name is not intended to be an insult against the translator (although it works just as well that way), hence the quotation marks: "blind idiot" is a Recursive Translation of the old saying "out of sight, out of mind". A computer in a lab was running a beta of some translation software package and translated "out of sight, out of mind"—meaning "if you hide something, sometimes people forget that it existed in the first place"—into Chinese and back to English, and the printout read "invisible idiot", which mutated further into "blind idiot".

Compare Recursive Translation. Also see Japanese Ranguage, Asian Speekee Engrish, and Intentional Engrish for Funny, where jokes are made about odd pronunciations. Can lead to Bite the Wax Tadpole. When someone tries to speak another language and fails horribly in this fashion, it's My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels.

There are pages contributing humorous examples of misguided translations. Perhaps the most popular one is Engrish.com.

The opposite is a translation by a Golden Translator.

## Anime & Manga

* The original 1993 Fueian dub of *Adventures of the Little Koala* was translated (rather poorly) from the Arabic dub. The dub is so full of this it's unimaginable FTR 1 didn't take it off air after the first episode. Kafén Grochiv, Jr., who directed and translated the dub, admitted his Arabic skills were very poor at the time, so for the most part, the dubbing script was really just a bunch of guesswork based on the few words he understood. Stúdíó Köfa, who recorded the 1993 dub, later redubbed the series in 2004 from CINAR's English dub and did a generally good job at it.
* *Sailor Moon* had a worse case with it's Fueian dub, which was done by another studio, Maxi Films. It was translated from DiC's English dub... poorly. The Sailor Scouts are now *the Sailor Moons*, Luna's name is either kept as is or translated into Fueian depending on whoever was directing the episode (keep in mind, Jákup Simonsson and Ábal Dyrssen shared directing duties for the dub), and Melvin's lines became utter nonsense. Averted with the later seasons, which were dubbed by Stúdíó Köfa from the Italian version, and very professionally at that compared to their previously mentioned failure with *Adventures of the Little Koala* (although the Sailor Scouts were still called the Sailor Moons, and are still called the Sailor Moons in the Fueian dub of *Sailor Moon Crystal*).
* Many early Geratizou Pansauran anime dubs (especially ones aired by Kidzhouse) had this issue - often times the scripts were translated from the Japanese scripts by translators with very poor Japanese skills, so for the most part dubbing scripts were really just a bunch of guesswork based on the few words the translators understood.