Why Mistranslation Matters
My hobby is finding translation mistakes in movie subtitles.  I&#x27;m a native English speaker and I also speak Japanese.<p>Essentially every show on Netflix seems to have some lines which are translating 100% incorrectly.  They&#x27;re not just issues of interpretation, they are full blown mistakes.  Let me give a few of examples:<p>The West Country (an area in England) was translated as &quot;America&quot; in the subtitles.<p>&quot;Boogie board&quot;(a small surfboard-like toy) was translated as &quot;electronic memo pad&quot;(there is an electronic memo pad with the brand name &quot;Boogie Board&quot;).<p>&quot;Middle of the road&quot; (not good and not bad) was translated literally.<p>Most of the mistakes I see seem to stem from the fact that the translator didn&#x27;t understand the original content.  I assume they are an individual Japanese native speaker, or a team with no English native speakers.<p>The article also mentions Trump&#x27;s tweets, one of which triggered a very strange phenomenon in Japan.  The famous &quot;grab her by the pussy&quot; tweet was deemed &quot;untranslatable&quot; by professional translators and the news repeated as such.  It won&#x27;t surprise you to learn that Japanese has plenty of words to describe genitals, both vulgar and not.  The translators were essentially lying.  There is a huge gulf between &quot;can&#x27;t&quot; and &quot;won&#x27;t&quot;.