Task Failed Sucessfully – The Subtle Art of the Deliberate Mistranslation

It takes a lot of skill to do something wrong on purpose. Failure is easy, because you either don't know the rules, don't have the experience to follow them to the required standard, or have been trying too hard and need a break (self-care, folks, it saves lives). But to incorporate a failure into the task successfully requires not only knowing the rules inside and out, but knowing how far you can bend them before they break.

Localizers do this as well, of course, mostly when reproducing accents and poor education, and incorporating that smoothly into a text requires an extraordinary amount of awareness, as well as fighting one of our basest urges as writers: avoiding cacophones (any verbal construction that sounds bad, contrived or silly). Be it avoiding repeating words in close proximity, using or avoiding contractions smartly to convey tone properly, or even simply keeping our inner snickering fifth-graders from going “That’s what she said” every few paragraphs. Today, we'll be going through three examples in increasing order of complexity and dissecting why they're so effective in their own contexts.

2025's Dispatch proposed many questions to its players, like "What makes a hero?", "Is there such thing as 'villain powers'?", "How many chances at redemption does someone get?", and, of course:

I love Sonar to pieces, like at least 60% of players. His balanced power set, creative looks and sheer goober energy perfectly complement his scam artist past, billionaire worship (I can fix him) and comedically awkward horniness.

Remember when I talked about cacophones a few paragraphs up? This is what I meant. When handling a line like that, we might feel the urge to either embrace its ridiculousness with intentionally snarky wording or defuse it into a neutral sentence. However, the deadpan delivery and the setup require us to keep it exactly as ridiculous as in the source. Sonar isn't ostensibly making a joke, he honestly wants to know if Robert is going to eat the crushed Twinkies. That it comes off as a Freudian slip about oral sex on petite males is for us to delight at (and for Robert to cringe at, because all comedy derives from misery).

Luckily, Portuguese is no stranger to associations between food and sex, since we can use the same verb for both. Thus, the localization team had probably the easiest slam dunk of the project: "Você vai comer esses twinks?" ("Are you going to eat/fuck those twinks?")

Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is a delightful little Hollow Knight-like (or, as a friend put it, a Metroidvania with pain) about a Japanese-inspired world with Shinto gods, yokai and walking, talking flower blossoms. (Mild spoilers for the game below. Do check it out if you enjoy the type.)

One character you meet early on is the otherworldly beauty known as The Vermillion Stranger, who appears in a weird, saucer-like craft and, initially, cannot be conversed with due to the language barrier.

Not long after, you come upon the game's hub of Sakura City and, with the help of the city’s archivist, get the ability to understand the Vermillion Stranger's speech, thus unlocking the game's fast travel system.

As always, the translator devil is in the details. Upon the completion of the relevant quest, Daichi the archivist triumphantly announces he's managed to obtain a *moderate* understanding of the Stranger's language. After having the knowledge quite literally infused into their mind, our protagonist starts hearing the fast-travelling Stranger speak in very broken English (or whatever language the game is set to.), with odd turns of phrase and incongruent use of words such as “Much delight has appeared! Long time such lonely!” “Welcome to fly!” and “For great distance!”.

Now, anyone who's been learning a new language recently should immediately be able to picture the situation: you have the vocabulary for a short conversation, but your brain simply can't string words together as naturally, and the result is... let's say, lacking. This tiny detail in the Vermillion Stranger's characterization is the sort of hidden nugget of gold only a translator who's acutely aware of how language works is prepared to handle. The fact that, as the game progresses, she adopts a more grammatically correct, but also very flowery mode of speech, is the cherry on top.

Translating these broken dialogues “correctly” entails consciously placing your linguistic centers in the awkward half-step of a novice, picturing how the original line in the Stranger’s dialogue might have sounded (“fly” as a homophone of “flying craft”, “delight” as an external source that can “appear” before you, etc.) and building something similar for your language, almost removing the source entirely to create a bridge between the Vermillion Tongue and your own that’s still vaguely shaped like the English source. This requires dissecting the very structures and rules of a language system, because you want something to sound off-kilter without careening into outright nonsense. It’s tougher than it looks!

Did you know the official writing guidelines for Warhammer 40K specify "Waaagh!" must always be written with at least three A's and an exclamation point? It's true!

The Greenskins from Warhammer, especially the Orks from the gothic-futuristic Warhammer 40.000, are the holy grail of deliberate mistranslation. Six out of ten words they speak are corrupted versions of "regular" English words, and a further three out of ten are neologisms wholly unique to their culture. With such highly anticipated games as Dawn of War 4 and Total War: Warhammer 40.000 on the horizon, this feels like the perfect time to analyze the Orks’ uniquely kooky speech and how the lucky translators working on the newest entries of the franchise have their work cut out for them.

Newcomer translators to long-running IPs, of course, don't have the time to take a college course on a subject matter before starting to work on it. So, even though there is enough material for a semester of study about the various races and settings of Warhammer 40k, we're keeping it relatively simple and, dare I say, surface-level. The fan in me is sadly putting away the materials for the 12-hour presentation we’re legally required to carry with us at all times.

It's plain to see Orks are meant to appear brutish, uncivilized, and even goofy at times, and their portrayals in audio traditionally impart a heavily Cockney accent, associated with the "uncultured" British working class and football hooligans. This reflects the satirical tone of the universe and its inspiration in Games Workshop's home country, but, crucially for translator work, it shapes the way people expect them to be represented. In-universe, Orks can communicate with the humans of the Imperium of Man, which are our main lens into the franchise, by virtue of species association and, well, the sheer volume of works published about them. This causes us to take their perception as default, for good or ill, and many a fan theory has been spun about how every account from the 40k universe is as an imperial propaganda piece, meaning even conflicting narratives can both be canonical, while, simultaneously, not being true.

Orks and humans speak the same language, but there is a marked difference in the way they speak: where the upper castes of humans speak measuredly, devotionally, Orks are portrayed as loud-mouthed and straight-to-the-point, with broken and truncated words conveying an unwillingness or inability to speak “properly”. Add to that their single-minded drive for battle, surprisingly developed spirituality, and shower-thought-like organic intellectualism, and attempts at adapting the Orks’... err... orkishness can get out of hand really fast.

Faced with the herculean task of bringing something so unique to other languages, the best way is to understand the context the Orks occupy in the 40k universe and draw parallels with your own culture and its stereotypes. Portuguese, for example, can draw from rural accents and favela lingo for the informality/lack of education, punk movements and cangaceiros for the boisterous affinity with violence, and even a pinch of meme culture here and there for the silly, comic relief elements that make the Orks such enjoyable characters. No doubt the localization for the newest games is already underway, and I have faith that the language teams will deliver sum’ proppa’ Orky flavor in their localized renditions.

In sum, the purpose of this article is to emphasize that formal training and an expansive vocabulary might take you far as a creative translator, but the mark of greatness lies in understanding nuance: from the source, in what kind of subtext is being conveyed, and how to impart the same subtext effectively into the target. When properly abstracted, it’s very hard not to find SOME common ground, even between very different cultures. We’re all human, after all, and every day there’s more to bring us together and less to push us apart. Our job, as cultural ferrypeople, is to make people realize that.