this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Long ago, I watched a youtube video of a girl singing a song from an anime that I'm assuming she'd translated herself in French. A bit bold because she didn't speak French. It was a nice try, but overall quite funny.
The part that really got me was a line about "a beautiful blooming spring" that she translated as "un beau ressort qui fleurit".
"Ressort" is the mecanical part that goes "boing". The season is "printemps".
This reminds me of a translation I saw for a spring themed song. Not the mechanical spring, the flowering one.
Japanese has three writing systems 漢字 which are essentially Chinese characters, the traditional kind rather than the simplified ones, ひらがな and カタカナ. They each complement one another and offer context, but sometimes you can also use different sets as a stylistic choice, which can deviate from general practise.
So there is this one line in the song
Typically you’d write that first word with hiragana, 人ごみ, meaning crowd. ゴミ is a different word meaning rubbish, garbage, trash, litter, etc.
Whoever translated the song must’ve been decently new to the language, and did a valiant attempt, but they separated words out too much, and read 人ゴミ as two words, and 掻き分け again as two words.
And thus translated it to something like “the people rummaged through the trash.”
So the actual meaning was roughly “I made my way through the crowd”
depending on the composition of the crowd the translation might hold up, e.g. trying to get through a crowd of tech CEO millionaires lol
Congress...
There's a YouTube channel whose entire schtick is that they take songs, translate them to one language, translate them to another, translate them back to the original, etc. then sing the resultant output.
I have my doubts about the honesty behind it, but the results are often entertaining.
There was a story going around some time ago of someone who got a tattoo in Hebrew writing and asked for the word "butterfly" (🦋) but it instead read "butter fly" (🧈 🪰).
That's number 14 in the list.
Haha, thanks for posting that! Great to see it again, and the others are also entertaining.
The latter is pretty funny. I know people that would ask for that intentionally.
What do you think of this... https://www.atlanticsuperstore.ca/fr/puces-beurre-de-miel/p/21365446_EA
Honey butter chips, translated to... Puces à beurre de miel.
lol chips being translated tu puces is ok if you are talking about micro chips being micro puces, but fried chips are croustilles.
I can't check the link directly, that store's site might be geolocked for some reason... But yeah, good one.
I found them in a MAXI store close to me. I had to buy one to try, it was not too bad but I don't trust a company that can't even translate properly for my food.
Wait was she doing the flcl theme?
Not sure, but I don't think so... I think it might have been the opening from Ouran Host Club. IIRC that's what my sister was watching back then, and she showed me that video.
There's a line about beautiful spring in there, maybe it's not a perfect fit but obviously the person doing that started from an English translation, and there might have been some creative liberty here and there.