Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese
I've seen Let's Plays of the Japanese translation of Portal and felt that it misses the sardonic notes of GLaDOS' script, and as a result falls completely flat.  In my opinion, this aspect is essential to the Portal experience.  It's not that I couldn't think of how to express certain lines in Japanese, rather it just seemed that the translation team didn't get the jokes at all.<p>That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult.  Sometimes you're lucky and there's a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that's recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category.  All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.<p>Having grown up with "spoony bard", "this guy are sick" and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren't a one-way street.