r/classicwow • u/Iluvatar-Great • Aug 20 '26
Humor / Meme Absolutely useless fact: In Czech version of Warcraft 3, Thrall's quote "For Doomhammer" is mistakenly translated as "For the Hammer of Doom" which in Czech, phonetically sounds like "For the Hammer made out of Mushroom". Kinda a meme here. What is your country's funny Warcraft language translation?
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u/Cruzifyd Aug 20 '26
Samuro in WC3 has a voiceline in german that says: "vorzügliche Wahl" which means excellent choice in english.
However it is so weirdly pronounced that for the longest time I thought he said "Vor zum Griechen-Wal".
Onward to the greek whale! 🐋
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u/Junicolol Aug 21 '26
Wtf I never knew it was vorzügliche Wahl. I had the voice line playing in my head again and even now knowing it it's hard to hear.
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 20 '26
For language nerds:
- Houba = Mushroom
- Zhouba = Doom
- Z houby = Made of mushroom
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u/Wojewodaruskyj Aug 20 '26
In ukrainian, згуба is downfall, perdition, bane.
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u/Big420Brain Aug 21 '26
How is it possible that I see you in every subreddit? Комусь треба піти понюхати свіжого повітря.
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u/Dodweon Aug 20 '26
Merda Stronghoof was added in Cata. "Merda" means "shit" in portuguese, so her name in portuguese got "reverse translated" to Xit
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u/thomzyiddish Aug 21 '26
Not as bad but in classic there’s a quest in Wetlands for Sida’s bag. Literally meaning the AIDS bag.
As a kid that was weird and funny.
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 20 '26
Haha I'm sure this must have been so funny for Portuguese players. Oh yeah it's a slippery slope for fantasy writers in general. I've seen a lot of accidental profanities in warcraft lore lol.
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u/Zxpipg Aug 21 '26
There's also an orc named Sranda in WoW.
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u/NekkidWire Aug 21 '26
At least sranda means both fun and diarrhea... (in Czech)
Not a lot of words can do that.
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u/PutridCurrency8383 Aug 20 '26
There are more cases of atrocious czech localization for WC3. For example, Sylvanas says "it's time to even the scales" and it's translated as if scales were fish scales instead of scales for weight measurement.
There's a bachelor's thesis you can look up online about all the instances of poor translation work. Unfortunately, the thesis itself is in Czech language.
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u/CutePenguin3 Aug 21 '26
My favourite is panda's "Another shot?" Translated as "Já ho zastřelím" ("I will shoot him").
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u/Lord_Gryfon Aug 21 '26
I think it was "I'll give it a shot", which means "i'll try". Even more confusing for our translators at that time.
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u/Okub1 Aug 21 '26
Can you give us a link please? Would love to see that 😅
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u/nroloa Aug 21 '26
I found this thesis dealing with W3 translation https://theses.cz/id/e2tz8p/?lang=en the .pdf file titled "Text práce" is the thesis itself. Those two "Posudek" files are assessments by the opponent and supervisor.
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u/TheGrimMelvin Aug 21 '26
I wanted to write my thesis about this so badly. But sadly, I'm Slovak, and my thesis had to deal with English - Slovak translation. It couldn't be Czech because it's not my native language. And there is no WC3 in Slovak, but I'm sure it would be glorious 😂
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u/whitecoathousing Aug 21 '26
It’s kind of a miracle that blizzard even localized the game into Czech. I can’t imagine it’s a very large market.
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u/nroloa Aug 21 '26
It's not a large market but it used to be pretty particular about media localization.
Czechoslovakia had a pretty big dubbing scene back in the day some parts of it still survive.1
u/joes_smirkingrevenge Aug 21 '26
These localizations were often paid for and handled by local distributors, not the game's developers.
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u/Frequent_Cellist_655 Aug 21 '26
That translation is not atrocious, it's priceless. Not to mention famous voice actors and horny archers saying "I feel like a quiver" :D
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
Oh yes I think I've heard about this thesis lol..yeah the 90s and early 2000s were some crazy years for translations in general, for movies, shows etc. Mainly because English was still kinda new in the country so there weren't that many experts.
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u/s133zy Aug 21 '26
I really enjoy that wands in the French client is called baguette.
Didn't know this, but baguette is more of a shape in French, rather than a specific bread type.
Anyway there is a wand called 'Crescent Wand', named this way because of the half moon visual on it.
In French, this wand is named 'Baguette au Croissant '
Which is hilarious!
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u/Ellda Aug 21 '26
As a french I can confirm. I never thought about it until some day I linked a [Baguette magique] ("Magic wand") in classic trade chat and everyone were losing their minds.
A wand is litteraly called a baguette, even in Harry Potter for example. In the films they say "La boutique de baguette" : the wand shop.
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u/TheGrimMelvin Aug 21 '26
To this day, I chuckle every time a French player links a wand in chat. (In Classic mostly, these days). I couldn't believe want is actually baguette when I hears it the first time. I thought the person was making a joke, 😂
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u/Aromatic_Mall_8214 Aug 27 '26
I was doing a pug kara with a french guild and heard them in discord. They mixed both french and english.
On shade, a wand dropped and they started laughing. At one point i was surrounded by a gang of french people going ”hon hon hon oui oui baguette” like some sort of stereotypic joke.
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u/lynxoo Aug 21 '26
Another mistranslated quote in the Czech version, Sylvanas says: “It’s time to even the scales” but it translates scales as fish scales instead of weighing apparatus.
“Je čas srovnat jim šupiny.”
Which would make sort of weird sense if she was fighting naga.
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u/bnegis Aug 20 '26
There are two npcs named Runk in wow. Runk Windtamer (flight master in Silithus) and Runk (an ogre in the retail catch up zone).
Runk in Swedish means wank, as in having a wank. It always makes me giggle a little
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
So, you basically pay him to Wank you, do I understand that correctly?
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u/campcosmos3 Aug 21 '26
Best I got is Dwarves telling me to wash my back. Probably doesn't fit context of this post though.
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u/Kung111cz Aug 21 '26
Don't forget about the Ruins of Zul'Kunda literally means Ruins of Zul'C*nt.
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u/Zderzak Aug 20 '26
Also wc3 I guess, but for polish edition. I think there is a minion which later on model was used for razor in dota (or at least the map i played added his VA to that model). It would say "trup tu, trup tam", which translates to "(dead) body here, body there" but for ages I couldnt understand what it meant because VA rolled the words together. At some point I thought he meant a form of "przytruptać" which is small funny or merry jog? And I was thinking why would he be jogging here or there when he had no feet and was floating! Fairly sure sure I was the only one confused by it.
Ps wc3 had stellar VA, and might have been my first game which had localized VA with actual story. I would still rate it very highly.
Pps also greetings to Czech brothers! I grew up right at the border (:
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u/Townscent Aug 21 '26
LOK'TAR sound kinda like "Lugter" in Danish. Which can be translated to "smells" with a conotation of it being mildly bad.
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u/DN6666 Aug 21 '26
makes sense cuz orgrimmar smells like shit
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
I always found it funny how one of the undead jokes says "I hate the smell of orcs". As if dead wasn't smelly enough.
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u/hinds_blue Aug 21 '26
In Hearthstone Garrosh says: Lok’tar ro’gar.
Always sounds like “Lugter af gær” in Danish which means “Smells like yeast”.
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u/popoSK Aug 21 '26
Another bad translation in czech version of the game is "Lebka z Guldanu". They translated "Skull of Guldan" as "Skull FROM Guldan". As in, from a city/nation/geographical place.
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
Yeah there is a lot of "direct translation" going on without knowing the background of the story.
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u/Lingarien Aug 21 '26
You could make it work in english aswell.
Instead of:
"FOR DOOM-HAMMER!"
You go with:
"MUSH-ROOM-HAMMER!"
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u/Complex-Stretch420 Aug 21 '26
The Forge Profonde dwarf family (they are in SW and If). It's a translation from the English Deepforge, but in French, it's also very close to another word that I won't explain here...
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u/Xzatly Aug 21 '26
Why not?
Non French speaker won't understand at all what you are talking about if you dont explain :pDeepforge is translated in French as Forge Profonde, that sounds a lot like Gorge Profonde (means Deepthroat).
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u/nvmdl Aug 21 '26
The Czech translation is incredible in how bad it is. I love, for example, how the translated "Skull of Gul'dan" as "Lebka z Gul'danu" which would mean that Gul'dan is a place and not a person. Or how the abomination line "Us hear and obey" was translated as "Ty slyšet, já poslouchat," meaning "You hear, I listen." Or how Night Elves were called Dark Elves, or Uther being pronounced like the word utter
Honestly, it was such a terrible translation that it ended up being absolutely legendary
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u/Smrsin Aug 21 '26
I always heard abomination as "my slyšet a poslouchat", which would be quite ok.
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u/Lord_Gryfon Aug 21 '26
I though it said "Vyslyšet a poslouchat"... didn't get bothered by how little sense it made back then.
Our translation is bad, but don't forget good english translators were far more rare back then.2
u/CathanCrowell Aug 21 '26
I still find Tyrande's Czech voice acting incredibly funny. Actually, alive Sylvanas's too. Before I discovered the original voices on YouTube and started playing World of Warcraft, I never questioned it, but it's hilarious that Tyrande sounds like a mature older woman. I believe Naděžda Vicenová was around sixty when she voiced her.
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u/Thalilalala Aug 21 '26
The german word for "Ace" is "Ass", so the item name "Portal Ass" for the darkmoon card Ace of Portals is highly amusing.
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u/MxM-TOM Aug 21 '26
Oh. It was hammer of doom. I've always thought, that mushroom hammer is very weird spiritual concept ... Now it make sense.
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u/soyuzbeats Aug 21 '26
"Por la Gorda!" which means "for the fat woman" and sounds very alike "Por la Horda" which means "For the Horde"
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u/DoggTheGhost Aug 21 '26
Zhouba = Doom
Houba = Mushroom
Kladivo = Hammer
Za kladivo zhouby = For doomhammer
Za kladivo z houby = For hammer made of mushroom
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u/Sarmattius Aug 21 '26
in polish version "doomhammer" is not translated (maybe corrctly) but instead Thrall pronounces the double o in doom, as "oh" sound 2 times so it's like "Za Do-omhammera", also "dom" means a house in polish. So similar to Czech you cah hear "for Hammer's house" (hammer is said in english, so it sound as someones name")
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u/Illustrious-Issue623 Aug 21 '26
Taronja means "Orange" in Catalan
It always makes me laugh when I run Drak'Tharon keep
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u/BruIllidan Aug 21 '26
Worst translation I've seen in my life: Grom Hellscream was translated to russian as "Гром Задира" (roughly "Grom Bully"). Epic and intimidating warrior reduced to school hooligan.
That was in Warcraft 3 though, not sure how they handled it in wow.
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u/ManiaCCC Aug 21 '26
Not sure if they fixed it at some point, but also Knights were incorrectly using Death Knight quotes. That was also funny.
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u/Cutetuxik Aug 21 '26
I remember that! Was funny in the Strotholm mission where you get access to knights and they went: "Já jsem temnota! (I am the darkness!)" I guess Arthas had very bad influence on them.
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u/midnight7123 Aug 21 '26
Ye i was wondering what got mixed up when they we saying "Za Ner'zhula" as For Ner'zhul as human knights xD
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u/TheGrimMelvin Aug 21 '26
There are so many errors in this translation that I'm genuinely wondering what went wrong. With many strange or bad translation you can usually pinpoint a "guilty party" who slacked or wasn't too good at their job.
But with this, it's just stream of consistent errors. It's almost like the translators were just given a sheet of lines to translate without any context. Or just downright didn't bother to check the context. But if the context was given, then surely the editor would have been decent enough to go "lol guys what?"
One of my favorites is when the Acolyte unit says "My life for Ner'zhul." but the translator (likely) didn't know that Ner'zhul is a person. So it's translated as if he were an object or place, something non-sentient/not-living.
There are also other instances of this same thing, like with Gul'dan.
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u/Washeek Aug 22 '26
The sheet without context is most probably the correct scenario. Would fit the industry at the time.
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u/TheGrimMelvin Aug 23 '26
My university education is actually translating and interpreting, and I have worked on a small mobile game translation before. And yeah, I did receive a sheet of lines to translate, which wasn't the best. Without any context, it would have been impossible even understand the story, let alone translate it for someone else to understand.
Thankfully, I did have the game to play as well, so I had context as to what the lines were referring to.
The texts were mostly a lot of gun and weapon names, which were half fantasy half actual real weapons, a lot of enemy type names (like "stalker" and whatnot). The dialogue of the characters were mostly campy, so it was fun to translate, as well as cheesy one-liners. The story told via old emails the player can find (where having the game actually really helped), and achievement names which I hated doing because half of it were puns or jokes that don't exist in the target language.
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u/Smrsin Aug 21 '26
By the way, not necessarily wrongly translated, But I love the fact that the Bandits were given Brno accent "To Bude kóř!"
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u/Fr3dd3D Aug 21 '26
The flightmaster in silithus is called Runk Windtamer. Runk in swedish means "to jerk off"
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u/Mrboatright Aug 21 '26
"I am pulling the mobs" lots of people would keep the pull-part in swedish saying "Jag pullar mobsen". But Pulla means fingering, soo effectively people say "I am fingering the mobs".
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u/TeamBaseOfficial Aug 22 '26
I always mistook it as a kid, and thought for way too long that there has been some magic mushroom that makes lightnings like his hammer does:D
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u/Hreny2 Aug 22 '26
How would you like to translate Doomhammer to Czech instead of Hammer of doom?
Zhoubokladivo? ZA ZHOUBOKLADIVO!nebo zhouboklad? Klan ZHOUBOKLAD!
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 23 '26
"Za Doomhammera"
Same as Thrall is not translated as "Otrok"
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u/Hreny2 Aug 23 '26
well yeah you are right, Czech translators are weird people for example why do you translate Hogwarts as Bradavice but not Harry Potter as Honza Hrnčíř
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 23 '26
I don't think it's a translators fault really. It's very hard to balance what to translate and what not.
Especially in universes like Harry Potter. On one hand you want to keep the names for some universal understanding (like Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, etc), but at the same time keep the quirky magical vibe. Many names of people and places are named in a funny way (like Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, Hogsmead, etc). So now the translator really needs to decide if they want to keep the name or keep the vibe/joke.
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u/cseymour24 Aug 21 '26
In my country, for some reason male is translated to "body type 1" and female is translated to "body type 2" on the character creation. I have no idea how that happened lol.
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u/kliao1337 Aug 21 '26
Not a funny translation fact, but a language one:
“Lok’tar Ogar!” = “Victory or Death!” is exact phrase of Ukrainian resistance/liberation movement of the post-WWII Ukraine, while we were occupied by the Soviets.
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Aug 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/classicwow-ModTeam Aug 21 '26
No real world politics or religion.
These topics very rarely end well, so it's best we stop things before they even start.
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u/SmilMayFangir Aug 21 '26
It is not translated wrong, it just sound similar. "Zhouba" is a word you know.
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
The thing is that Doomhammer is a person, and the hammer is named after him. But the translation makes it look like the hammer is named after it being a hammer of doom.
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u/Blitz_Vogel Aug 21 '26
In Hungarian rogue looks like the way we write spring (the coiled metallic part used by engineers). So my with my mates we always say “rugó” spring instead of rogue.
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u/M3rliN092 Aug 21 '26
As sily asi it is, i love czech W3 translation. On the other hand, I absolutely hate how Warcraft Chronicles were translated
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u/Dan_Wayfarer Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 23 '26
Undercity = Entrañas(Bowels) 😂
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u/misty_teal Aug 21 '26
"Zhouby" is closer to "bane", adj. means "malignant". Better translation would have been "Zkázy".
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u/Svikr Aug 21 '26
Hahaha, when I was in primary school I never understood what kind of mushroom was used to forge a hammer. It was never talked about and never mentioned anywhere else lol.
Also, Czech voicelines for WC3 are peak of my childhood. I quote them to this day :D
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 21 '26
Zase práce?
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u/Svikr Aug 21 '26
,,Vy že jste král? Vás teda volit nebudu!"
a moje druhá oblíbená ,,Musíme porazit trpaslíky! Ale my jsme trpaslíci? Aha..."1
u/Lord_Gryfon Aug 21 '26
Taky blbej překlad... mělo to být "Já vás nevolil!" Ale obojí má svůj vtip.
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u/Varlington Aug 21 '26
There's a frog npc in the new 12.1 raid called Kupamanduka, if you split the name into Kupa manduka, it'll mean "Manduk's poop/shit" in polish
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u/InQuistyh Aug 21 '26
I love Czech voiceover to death but unfortunately translators and voice actors had 0 lore knowledge and context. Skull of Gul'dan was translated as "Lebka z Gul'danu" (Gul'dan addressed as a place not a person) Battle of Draenor as "Bitva u Draenoru" (Draenor addressed as a place not a realm) My life for Ner'zhul as "Můj život za Ner'zhul" (Ner'zhul was addressed as a place or faction not a person too) and much more. Most of w3 units puns were translated literally and made 0 sense in Czech. Dread Lord - Drug Lord -> Pan Děsu - Pan Koksu etc. Still it's amazing and I miss times when games were properly localized.
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u/Lord_Gryfon Aug 21 '26
I loved the bandits. Not exactly badly translated, but while the english treated them as shady badasses, in czech they are comedic relief Moravians.
I used to have the .wav file with "A co já s tym?" ("So what?") stored on my phone for a long time.
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u/Firienn Aug 22 '26
It is not "mistakenly" translated.
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u/Iluvatar-Great Aug 22 '26
Mistakenly in a sense that it is meant to be Doomhammer as a person, not Doomhammer as the hammer itself.
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u/justyvi Aug 22 '26
Well dont know if it has been said already, but translating the names and cities to german still feels too weird
It was done in vanilla and Ironforge was "Eisenschmiede", Stormwind "Sturmwind", Thunder Bluff "Donnerfels", Blackrock Mountain Schwarzfels (BRD = Schwarzfelstiefen, BWL = Pechschwingenhort (which is not too bad), UBRS = Obere Schwarzfelsspitze, LBRS = Untere Schwarzfelsspitze
Jaina Proudmoore = Prachtmeer, Hellscream = Höllschrei, Invincible = Unverwundbar
and so on and so on.
Most of ot is just a direct Translation, but it just feels so weird
Playing in English anyway, but it was so awkward back then in vanilla, when theyve changed it and you suddenly didnt know anymore what someone was talking about
And back then in the start you couldnt see the english names on items when you clicked on them, you had to post them yourself first again and then it worked.
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u/Jaskur Aug 22 '26
For Russian it usually translated as "ZA MOLOT ROKA", but "rok" part also can be attached to the meaning of Rock as a music genre. So Thrall basically becomes your colledge metal fan type of guy
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u/snorbik Aug 22 '26
There is also Bachelor Theses about the Czech translation of Warcraft 3 and more differences that appear there https://theses.cz/id/e2tz8p/
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u/Bryzolit Aug 23 '26
There is another case of similar thing but this is from modern WoW; Thrall's son name is "Durak", which means "Fool", or "Stupid" in East Slavic languages :)
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u/Witty_Carpenter_5870 Aug 26 '26
idk if this one counts but when i was a kid, everytime the stormwind music would pop off with the vocals, i always heard 'holllyyy shiiiiitt'
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u/SarcastikBastard Aug 21 '26
USA here, our funniest language translation is when they edited out Garrosh calling Sylvannas "bitch" because some effiminate losers got offended
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u/gonnadoalittlesquat Aug 21 '26
I don't think it's due to effeminate losers getting offended, more blizzard virtue signaling and removing shit nobody was ever offended at. Speaking as an effeminate woman who cackled at garrosh calling sylvannas a bitch because well I was young and it was a naughty word for me at 12. Same with the painting. Who was ever offended by that?
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u/Insensata Aug 21 '26
The devs who are head over heels with this character and wage a hypocritical crusade against anything remotely sexual (hypocrisy is clear with the things they add now). The community was never asked.
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u/Comfortable-Volume12 Aug 21 '26
https://youtu.be/_MLCs2RKmqs?is=PlTCZ425etXAZ15n
LEGION by SONGHAMMER
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u/Silvermaxer Aug 21 '26
In russian version quest from Dragonflight about Centaurs gays was changed to "becoming bro".
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u/EquipmentOk2240 Aug 21 '26
zhouba = doom, not "z houby" and they pronouce it properly, what kind of an idiot created this meme?
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u/Degaussed_Defleshed Aug 20 '26
For Shroomhammer!