I ran kinda ran outta photos, or rather motives worth capturing, for today, so I thought I tell you a story instead. You see, my native language is German. Yes, I had English in school, but I would not call that English in the sense of how native speakers would speak it. It was more like tourist English, like “hello, my name is James, where are the toilets please”. Useful like a hole in the head, right?! I started to learn real English from native speakers at the end of the nineties. Well it started at that time and it was a long fun journey, but ones you obtained that skill you will notice that there is something wrong with the entertainment industry….

Most of the stuff we watch on TV or our streaming services is made in one of the English speaking countries and therefor the original tone is English. The first time I noticed that something was wrong was when I was watching the movie Ice Age first time in it’s original tone AFTER I had watched it in German a few time. Woah! In English it was a whole different movie. Not only did I not have to endure that super annoying voice of Otto Waalkes who did the voice over for one of the heros, no, a lot of the dialogs where different and there where tons of jokes in the movie that I didn’t get with the German version. Someone messed up the translation big time.

From there I started to watch every show and movie I cared about in English whenever I got the chance. Often here in Germany they do not let you have the chance. They force you to watch the crappy German translation. Amazon often gives you a choice and I appreciate that a lot. The German streaming service doesn’t, but a lot of the modern series are translated in a way that you can still hear the original tone and then you get the really crappy German translation, what makes it worth. You hear every wrong translation and every time they just totally change what is said.

But the most hilarious totally wrong translation I ever stumbled over can be found in World of Warcraft, Warlords of Dreanor expansion. My daughter was playing on a German client and my client was English. There was this quest called “For the Bird”. The right translation would have been “Für die Vögel”. Very simple, right? You could think so, I mean even Google can translate that correct. But nope, in the German client it was named “Gut zu Vögeln”. If you translate that literally you would get “Friendly to Birds” buuuut and this this a huge BUT, “gut zu vögeln” is German slang for “good to have sex with”. What where they thinking? I doubt Blizzard ever found out.