• In Aquaman (1991), this is done in-universe when Aquaman tries to make peace with Oumland, as the translator says he's saying the complete opposite of what he means to say and escalates the people into violence. He's only saved from getting killed when the Oumlandian Prime Minister himself comes out to stop it.
• Asterix: In Asterix and the Goths, the Gallic-Goth translator is threatened with death if he can't convince Getafix to make magic potion. When Getafix naturally refuses, the translator instead says the druid is agreeing - all so he can escape before the chief catches on.

• In one Garfield strip, Garfield announces he's going to translate whatever Odie is going to say. "Bark bark bark", says Odie. "Cats are smarter than dogs," says Garfield. The look on Odie's face makes it clear he was not saying "cats are smarter than dogs."
• Discussed in Mafalda, where the main character ponders doing this as an UN translator so she can help achieve world peace.

• The Roboutian Heresy: The translators that the Tau use when dealing with the Imperium (and possibly other races) are secretly designed to carefully twist everything the Imperials say to be slightly worse. The possibility of peace was never very high in the first place, but this was part of the plan to make it impossible. The Ethereals are by now a Chaos Cult serving Guilliman, making the rest of the Tau Unwitting Pawns who think they are fighting to free unjustly enslaved innocents.

• In Arrival, Louise points out that humanity's attempts to communicate with the heptapod aliens suffer, not from an agenda issue per se, but from the differing frameworks that different teams are using for their work - The Chinese team based their work on Mahjong which, as an inherently competitive game, means biases may have crept in to their understanding of the messages they are recieving. She's proved right when the Chinese team translate a message as "Offer Weapon" and international and interspecies tensions rapidly escalate - Weapon in this case being a mistranslation of "Tool", and ultimately referring to the Heptapod language itself.
• In The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom, MacBride makes the mistake of hiring Mityushin to translate for him when he speaks to Zina. When MacBride says something romantic to her, a drunken Mityushin chooses to translate it as an accusation of her being a Gold Digger.
• Denial: One of the many things Deborah Lipstadt accuses David Irving of is that he does this with documents from Nazi Germany to push forward his claim that the Holocaust never happened. She gets in touch with another historian that also knows German to prove her point during the trial.
• The Last of the Mohicans has a heroic example. Several of the protagonists are captured by the Hurons after the British convoy is ambushed following the Battle of Fort William Henry. Chief Sachem initially wants to burn Colonel Munroe's daughter Cora to satisfy the grudge that Hurons, especially Huron war leader Magua have against Munroe, while making a point of sparing Munroe's other daughter Alice. At this point Hawkeye offers to die in her place but, not being able to speak French, he tells Duncan to translate this offer for him. Duncan deliberately ignores Hawkeye's demand, instead offering to trade himself for Cora. Sachem agrees to this.
• Life Is Beautiful: An altruistic example. When Jewish-Italian Guido is sent to a concentration camp with his four-year-old son, he tries to preserve the child's innocence by convincing him the entire thing is a game. After they arrive, the German guards ask for a volunteer to translate the camp's rules for the new inmates, and Guido offers himself. He doesn't speak German, but uses it as an opportunity to further his ruse. It ends up being a Black Comedy Comical Translation, as Guido is enthusiastically meeting the energy of the German guard, but he is explaining that the goal of the game is to get 1000 points and win a tank, while the German guard is explaining that anyone who does not follow orders promptly or tries to escape will be killed.
• Reds: In order to better motivate a crowd of Muslims to support the Bolsheviks, Zinoviev uses this trope to replace Reed's call to class war with a call to jihad.
• The Rundown: Beck is confronted by several Portuguese-speaking rebels and asks the bilingual Travis to help him convince them there's no need for a fight. Travis instead deliberately mistranslates Beck's words in order to instigate a fight between him and the rebels.
• Under the Sun: Olaf is an illiterate farmer, who has fallen in love with his housekeeper Ellen, who turns out to be secretly married. Ellen, who does not know that Olaf is illiterate, leaves a good-bye note in which she confesses that she's married, proclaims her love for him, and says she'll sort things out. Olaf gives the note to his friend Erik to read. Erik, jealous of the Olaf-Ellen romance, maliciously makes up a completely different message, pretending that the note says Erik gave her money to pay off a debt and she left with it, and leaving out the declaration of love.

• A famous, and somewhat universal, joke has a translator interpreting what a captured rich man is saying, and vice-versa his captors. Repeated demands for the location of a treasure, threatening the hostage's life, only get the answer "I won't tell." from the hostage — until one of the bandits draws a weapon, at which point the hostage shouts where the treasure is hidden. The (clearly greedy) translator looks at the other bandits, and says "He says you don't have the balls to shoot him, boss."

• Teriana from Dark Shores has been forced to help Marcus and his legions conquer Dark Shores but she constantly tries to undermine their efforts, sometimes with the help of creative translation (as for a time she is the only person who speaks local languages).
• The Devil's Dictionary defines an interpreter as "one who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said".
• Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, Gaspode the Wonder Dog helps Carrot question a rescued wolf, but in the process casts Carrot as a wolf-hating psycho who has poisoned the chicken he's offering as a bribe.
  Carrot watched the wolf flee.
  "Odd," he said. "You've have thought it'd be hungry, wouldn't you?"
  Gaspode looked up from the roast chicken. "Wolves, eh?" he said, indistinctly.
• The Dresden Files: Changes has a combination subversion/inversion, as while there's a strong hint that the translation was reasonably accurate (or at least it wasn't worth arguing over any possible diffences), the person being translated was using the fact that a translator was involved to push his own agenda- specifically, any promises spoken by the translator weren't binding since he didn't directly say them to Harry, so wasn't bound by them.^note It gets downplayed by the fact that the "promise" was rather specific (not to harm a certain person while a separate issue was being settled), and by the time the other person announced he was going ahead with a sacrificial ritual, it had technically already been fulfilled. And this was revealed by the bad guy in English, proving that the translator wasn't needed to have a conversation.
• In the Eric Carter book Ghost Money by Stephen Blackmoore, Eric's old friend from Hong Kong Billy Kwan introduces a man who speaks no English to Eric whose Cantonese is very limited as his boss Bo-xiansheng of the 14K Triad and translates negotiations between Eric and Bo-xiansheng for Eric to investigate Nanong Fan, a Necromancer who is making ghost bombs for the rival Sun Yee On Triad. Shots are then fired into the room where they're meeting, and Bo-xiansheng is killed. Billy then begs for Eric's help to salvage the investigation lest his superiors in the triad have him killed for his failure. Eric agrees to help. Much later, Eric discovers that rather than a low-level member of the 14K Triad, Billy is an up-and-coming member of the Sun Yee On Triad in no small part because he was behind the ghost bomb project in the first place and plans to improve on it with the help of a more skilled necromancer, specifically Eric.
• In Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot story "The Stymphalian Birds", two conwomen stage the murder of an Invented Individual who they claim is the abusive husband of one of them in a Central European country and get the mark to give them money that they claim they will use to bribe the police to cover up the murder. Since the mark is a monolingual Englishman, he has to trust them to do all the talking to the police. They get caught when they later translate an innocent conversation with another guest as that guest revealing that she knows about the murder and demanding a payoff. At that point, the mark consults fellow guest Hercule Poirot about the apparent Blackmail, and the con unravels.
• Julian Comstock: The Narrator finds a letter belonging to a dead Dutch soldier and asks one of his officers what written on it. The officer replies that the writer is saying how he hates Americans. The letter is actually the kind you'd expect form a soldier fighting overseas - telling his wife he misses her and griping about the lousy war and the weather.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: Throughout the book, the government is in the process of replacing standard English with Newspeak, which is designed to make anti-Party thoughts impossible to convey. Although most pre-Revolution literature is set to be erased from history altogether, some select prestigious authors (William Shakespeare and Lord Byron, among others) are being translated into Newspeak so their works align with the Party's ideals.
• Planet of Adventure: The Wankhmen, humans who are a Servant Race of the alien Wankh, have been doing this for centuries to maintain their privileged position. The Wankh have little interest in local affairs as they're just on the planet to keep an eye on their enemies the Dirdir, and the Wankhmen make sure that no-one else has a chance to learn the complex musical language of their masters. Being the sole conduit for information, they're able to play up the threat from the Dirdir as being much worse than it is, so the Wankh will maintain their military bases on the planet.
• In The Saga of Tanya the Evil, the title character notices something strange in the translations of the Rus soldiers captured in the Imperial invasion of their territory, and has her second lieutenant, a Heroic Russian Émigré, to sit around one such interrogation and give her unbiased translation. Sure enough, the military translators are exaggerating the soldiers' hardline Communist leanings - whatever worry they have about the invasion has very little to do with political leanings. Irritated at how the translators are obsessively conflating the Rus people with Communism, she makes a private suggestion to her superiors to dispense with the Army's in-house translators and switch to Imperial scholars.
• In a rare heroic example, the translator from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Greek Interpreter" exploited the kidnappers' ignorance of Greek, questioning their prisoner about the circumstances of his captivity while they thought he was interrogating him about things they wanted to know.
• Star Trek: The Captain's Oath: During negotiations with the Agni, the translator, a Regulan-born who lost a friend during the Agni's recent attack, is persuaded by the war-hungry head of the planet's defense force to fudge the translation to make the Agni look hostile. Kirk soon spots that something's up, and she confesses, allowing them to fix things before it gets too far.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Essential Guide to Droids stated that Cybot Galactica's 3P0-series protocol droids actually had to have creativity dampeners installed to keep them from unnecessarily embroidering their translations.
  • In X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar, Wedge Antilles and a few of his squadmates have been roped into a diplomatic mission to the neutral world of Adumar, whose Hat is an obsession with fighter pilots killing each other for honor points. The locals speak enough Basic for Wedge and the others to get by, but he still relies heavily on his diplomatic advisor to navigate any cultural issues. Said advisor gets increasingly irritated with Wedge for not engaging in lethal duels with the natives like the Imperial delegation is doing, until Wedge accuses him of overstepping his authority for the sake of the mission. Things come to a head when their host country's leader declares himself ruler of the whole planet and asks for the foreign pilots' assistance bringing the rest of the world to heel — Wedge of course refuses, and the diplomat hurries over to try to phrase things more politely. But instead the diplomat tells the local ruler a sob story about Wedge dearly wanting to aid him in his war of conquest, but being trapped by his other obligations, with an honorable death in battle his only escape. So the ruler declares Wedge and the other New Republic pilots fugitives, making them fair game for anyone out to earn some personal honor by murdering them, and forcing the heroes to fight their way to safety.
• Subverted in Lawrence Block's Tanner's Twelve Swingers where despite his boss' request that he "translate" an eastern European political author's latest book in a way which would be more favorable to the western countries, especially the US, the title character fully intended to translate it "word for glorious word."
• Warlock of Gramarye: In A Wizard in Chaos, a boss' steward is deliberately mistranslating prices quoted by merchants and taking the excess. This lands him in trouble when the protagonist, a telepath, shows up.

• Ask Rhod Gilbert: Rhod (who is Welsh) claims that it's only in English that new inventions get new words, as in Welsh, a microwave is a 'popty ping', literally meaning 'ping oven'. The actual Welsh word for microwave is 'meicrodon', with 'popty ping' being an informal and childish way of referring to it.
• Doctor Who: In "Planet of the Ood", the slavers' presentation reveals that they offer a selection of translation devices to make the eponymous race's speech conform to what their masters want to hear, thus creating the illusion of Happiness in Slavery.
• An episode of Into the West sees a dispute over a cattle between some Mormon caravaners and a local Lakota village. When US troops arrive to settle the dispute, they find that the only person who can speak Lakota and English is a drunk scout who intentionally mistranslates what the Lakota chief is saying to portray them as more belligerent than they are. The Lakota know something is amiss but can't get their point across to the officer in charge. The whole situation ends with the massacre of the Lakota village.
• "The Newsroom": In Season 1's Episode 6 "Bullies", while filling in for Elliot as anchor on ACN's 10PM show, Sloan Sabbith interviews the spokesman of a nuclear energy company in Japan via a translator seated next to him on camera. However, as Sloan also speaks Japanese, she quickly realizes - and states aloud on air - that the translator is not faithfully communicating the source's responses to her questions, but that she was in fact subtly editorializing the answers he gave so as to downplay the threat level of the ongoing nuclear meltdown crisis at Fukushima, the subject of their discussion.^note The interview goes downhill from there, as Sloan - having been egged on earlier that day by Will to press her guests harder for the facts - proceeds to switch to directly speaking to / arguing with the source in Japanese. In response to Elliot's protests, she pulls out her earpiece, and finally states in English what the source had revealed to her off the record in a private phone call earlier that day, but would not state on air - a mortal sin of journalism. The broadcast quickly ends, and pandemonium in the newsroom ensues.
• Scrubs: One time JD had a patient who only spoke German and asked the patient's brother to help him break some bad news about his prognosis, the brother instead told him everything was going to be fine, and JD was wondering why the patient was taking it so well until he repeated the brother's exact words to Elliot (who speaks German).
  • In another instance Elliot trolls Dr. Cox when he (in his regular dismissive manner) asks her for a German translation of some medical info ("your lungs have fluid in them") to relay to a patient. She gives him a German phrase that means "Your wife has great tits." As an added bonus, this is said while Cox thinks he is miming a pair of lungs.
• One episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day names the Translation with an Agenda process "Harry Bosco" after an In-Universe example. In this episode, figuring out what was actually said before the translation was Harry Boscoed is a major plot point.

• MAD:
  • The magazine ran an article on American tv shows which had been (allegedly) dubbed by Soviet television, re-translated into English, with the various characters bemoaning their fates or otherwise delivering very unsubtle stabs at the American Way. For example, in a Peanuts Halloween special which showed the kids going Trick or Treating, the dialogue was changed to the kids having to go begging door to door to get something to eat and being so embarrassed that they dress in costumes so nobody will see their shame.
  • There was a "Mad Look At" strip where a man was speaking at a political rally with someone translating into Sign Language. Everyone in the room gets offended. The last panel is the interpretor being paid by the man's opponent.

• In Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, Loozly loiters around the alien Gholos; the entity's language is so complex, even the Doctor can't understand it, so Loozly translates for him, keeping his species' traditional hardline stance against Angvians. It turns out Gholos is actually part of a delegation trying to strike a peace treaty with the Angvians Loozly is ferociously against, so he's been translating his pleas for help as insults and bravado.

• This is a recurring theme in the play Old Wicked Songs, as pianist Stephen Hoffman and his teacher Josef Mashkan translate foreign language songs into English. At first, Hoffman translates the songs more or less literally, while Mashkan insists that some deviation is needed to capture the true meaning of the songs; Hoffman is initially resistant, but comes around. In both cases, it's clear that in making these less-than-literal translations, Mashkan and Hoffman are bringing their own feelings to bear on the words.

• Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  • Solas speaks Elvish better than anyone else in the series (yes, including other elves), and occasionally mutters full sentences, instead of just peppering a word here and there like all the other elves do. If you ask what he said, his translations are always at least a little bit wrong. For example, at the Well of Sorrows, he tells Abelas "Malas Amelin ne Halam, Abelas." Solas tells the Inquisitor he hoped that Abelas would find a new name, since Abelas means "sorrow." It actually translates as "Now the blood is finished," a reference to the "blood writing" ancient elves used to identify themselves as slaves to their gods (and modern elves use as tribal markings).
  • Downplayed with Iron Bull. When the Inquisitor finds out that his qunari name/rank is "Hisraad," Bull says that it translates as "weaver of illusions." Another qunari bluntly says that it just means "liar."
    Iron Bull: Well you don't have to say it like that.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the HK-50 droids masquerade as protocol droids (who among other things work as translators) to spread anarchy and war by ruining diplomatic confrontations. Judging by some of the cut content (where you see the place they're manufactured and trained), they are not at all subtle about it, often opening conversations with vile insults and overt threats they attribute to their "masters".
• Mass Effect: Averted, but the aversion itself is an agenda. The normally-insular Batarian Hegemony makes a point of providing up-to-date glossaries and language rules to the rest of the galaxy, in order to facilitate the spread of their propaganda.
• Return of the Obra Dinn: One of the flashbacks shows a sailor who only speakes Chinese being executed for murder, with the captain stating that he confessed to the crime. The very next flashback shows you that murder... and the killer is someone completely different. You later learn that there's one person on the ship who speaks both English and Chinese, and he was in collaboration with the actual murderer. The circumstances surrounding the Chinese sailor's death then become clear.
• In Sam & Max Save the World, Sam is tasked as the translator between Whizzer and the president, despite the fact that both speak English. The president nonetheless insists that he can't understand anything Whizzer says, so Sam has to deliberately mistranslate in order to accomplish his goals.
• A random event in Stellaris can have an ambassador's Translator Microbes hacked by an outside faction in a bid to damage relations between two empires. In this case, it is not so much the translator who has an agenda but the people putting words in the translator's mouth.

• In Alone, Together the main characters Danni and Jerom are soldiers from two different nations that were recently at war stranded on an island together, neither speaks the other's native tongue and Danni never heard that the war ended. Eventually some pirates come by and Jerom speaks to them in an island trade language, asking one who speaks Danni's language to tell her that the war is over. The pirate tells her that the war is still going on. However, she happens to speak the trade language.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court we have Zimmy, who translates for the Polish-speaking Gamma. Zimmy has a tendency to "translate" a lot of what other people say into insults, to prevent Gamma from making friends with anyone else, and thus keep her around.
• Tuuri Hotakainen of Stand Still, Stay Silent is the only member of the expedition who can translate Finnish. Her cousin Lalli doesn't speak anything but Finnish... and Tuuri has a history of dismissing Lalli's perspective when she wants him to go along with something. This affects how she conveys orders from Sigrun and translates his scouting reports

• The SCP Foundation file SCP-140 describes a Tome of Eldritch Lore chronicling an Always Chaotic Evil Empire, the Daevites, whose history is laden with insanely horrible Black Magic and slavery, which seems to be struggling to become real again after being Ret-Gone. SCP-6140 turns this on its head, revealing 140's author as Thomas Bruce, a single racist British man, who heard a few nasty incidents about the real SCP-6140 (a perfectly normal nation renowned mostly for its agricultural techniques but carrying an unfortunately unsavory history), and decided they were like that all the time. He then used a bit of magic to delete the whole country from history so his book would be the only available chronicle. The truth comes out when all copies of SCP-140 are destroyed... and the real Daevastan comes back. The Foundation reclassifies the file, admitting they were wrong, making the whole thing public to all Foundation staff, and asks everyone to use the proper names and make an effort to reconcile the realities to quash Bruce's racist diatribe for good.

• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, a yeti/abominable snowman they are with creates a lynch mob out of a remote village by altering what Billy asked him to say to sound like threats.
• Star Wars Rebels: Done by Sabine Wren in "Droids in Distress". When asked to translate an Aqualish merchant's words into Basic for the benefit of Imperial minister Maketh Tua (after first arranging for her translation droid to be removed), Sabine mostly translates faithfully, but doctors the translation to give the wrong docking bay where the MacGuffin is stored, so they have time to steal it themselves.

By Translator:

• Boy, did Italian dubbers during The '70s love their ships.
  • Candy♡Candy: While it was probably because of fan backlash, the Italian editors of Candy♡Candy rewrote the ending into Candy and Terry reuniting again, even though in canon she decided that Susanna was the one for him and she's with Albert at the end. Keiko Nagita leaving her love interest ambiguous in Candy Candy: The Final Story doesn't help things, though.
  • Voltes V: While the Japanese version establishes that Prince Heinel and Katherine Rii are already in love (and both have a bad case of Cannot Spit It Out), the Italian dub rewrites Heinel (or, shall we say, Sirius) to be more lovey-dovey, such as calling her his lover and her death being the reason for his suicide. In contrast, his Japanese counterpart was a tsundere.
• Funimation has quite a few examples in their simuldubs. For a while, Jamie Marchi was Mis-blamed for all of the below despite not being the writer for all the dubs that attracted controversy, but regardless of who exactly was responsible for these translations, they're examples regardless:
  • The simuldub of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid changed a line from,
    Tohru: What's with that outfit?
    Lucoa: Everyone was always saying something to me, so I tried toning down the exposure. How is it?
    Tohru: You should try changing your body next.

to this,

Tohru: What are you wearing that for?
Lucoa: Oh those pesky patriarchal societal demands were getting on my nerves, so I changed clothes.
Tohru: Give it a week, they'll be begging you to change back.

• Their dub of My First Girlfriend Is a Gal completely rewrote the context of episode 7 to make it a Take That! towards Donald Trump and Visual Novel fans, with the latter in particular being dismissed as misogynists.
• Notoriously, a Gamergate reference in Funimation's Prison School simuldub was ultimately removed for the home release.

By Series:

• The "Wild Fang" translation group, when translating Baki the Grappler, was known for deliberately rewriting things that seemed "gay", both in terms of homoerotic content and just anything with some kind of emotional intimacy (yes, that includes heterosexual emotional intimacy).
  • When Baki considers going further with his girlfriend, Yujiro appears. In the original version, Yujiro's dialogue is basically to encourage Baki, telling him that his love for his girlfriend will make him stronger as a fighter and a person (which Yujiro wants, because he wants his son to surpass him). Wild Fang completely rewrote this into Yujiro telling Baki that he isn't getting stronger fast enough, and demand that I Want Grandkids because maybe Baki's own son will surpass him. Not only is this nothing like the original text, it introduces a whole new plot point that just wasn't there originally.
  • In Bakidou, a man recounts that he was raped by Yujiro, as part of a sequence explaining that Yujiro views all people other than him, regardless of age, fitness, or gender, as female due to his extreme levels of testosterone. Despite the blatant, unambiguous imagery and dialogue, Wild Fang tried to rewrite the scene entirely to explain that the guy wasn't actually raped and had never even met Yujiro, and rather, it was a metaphor for how afraid of Yujiro he was, and how unmanly he was next to Yujiro.
  • Jack Hanma's backstory is that he's a Child by Rape, with his mother, Diane Neil, having been raped by Yujiro during the Vietnam War. The original text is quite clear that she didn't want it, that Yujiro inflicted it as a form of vengeance and dominance, and she found it traumatizing. However, the head of the translation group was adamant that Yujiro couldn't be a rapist, even comparing it to Darth Vader being called a rapist. Consequently, he rewrote the scene to add as much of a "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization as he could get away with.
• Cardcaptor Sakura: There's an infamous scanlation where Tomoyo's Love Confession to Sakura is unchanged, but presented with a Note from Ed. on the side that reads "Ewww..." It's uncertain if this was in reaction to the lesbianism, the fact that they're both underage, or to the fact that they're second cousins, but it qualifies as an agenda regardless of which it is.
• The infamous Gag Dub of Ghost Stories adds in a heap of jokes about the American right (such as turning Momoko into a Christian fundamentalist) and the Bush administration that obviously weren't in the original Japanese script.
• The official English version of the BL Otokonoko manga I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend Into a Girl by Seven Seas Entertainment^note who already has a history of removing and/or altering content in the media they've licensed made numerous changes to the script in an attempt to pass off male crossdresser Hiura as a transgender woman (even referring to him with feminine pronouns after a certain point), despite it being explicitly stated numerous times in the original story (and by the original author) that Hiura still identifies as male despite his crossdressing. The translation also completely excises a joke^note Hiura getting confused when he gets hit on, and thinking he's being panhandled instead to have Hiura go on an unprompted rant about misogyny. The backlash from readers was so severe that Seven Seas eventually issued an apology and a redo of the first volume, but the damage was already done and the manga primarily became known in the wider internet for this incident.
• For the English dub of the Lovely★Complex anime, Discotek Media accepted unpaid volunteer work from freelance translator Brendan Blaber, who introduced a lot of changes that he described at length in a public blog post. Apart from "making things less transphobic" (by heavily rewriting parts of the story relating to the male-to-female transgender character Seiko), the changes made in his draft included rewriting/interpreting the lead characters Risa and Otani as "a psychopath who doesn't understand empathy" and "being in a cycle of abuse without realizing it", respectively. Fans were not happy when these motivations for script changes were revealed, and Discotek released a (later deleted) statement with an apology, distancing themselves from the translator's actions. The most infamous request (that the manga author's Creator Cameo in the final episode be removed) did not make it into the release, although several choices in the final translation still reflect Blaber's attitude toward the material.
• Pokémon: The First Movie: The 4Kids Entertainment dub of the movie went beyond 4Kids's usual practices of Bowdlerization and Cultural Translation and changed the moral from "all life is equal" to "fighting (at least to the death) is bad", which is quite a Broken Aesop in a franchise like Pokémon.
• The Netflix 2019 redub of Neon Genesis Evangelion had a background newscast mention "leftist terrorists" (where in the original dub, they were just "terrorists") which, while allegedly a reference to the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack perpetrated by Doomsday Cult Aum Shinrikyo, still raised a lot of eyebrows. Additionally, there was a controversy over Kaworu saying "I love you" to Shinji being changed to "You are worthy of my grace", supposedly to tone down any Ho Yay. Apparently, it was closer to the original Japanese, but that didn't prevent Unfortunate Implications.
• Sentai Filmworks has been known to rewrite dialogue in some of their dubs. For example, episode four of their dub of To Love Ru has Rito being called "misogynistic" for refusing to marry a woman who couldn't cook as opposed to being called "old fashioned" in the sub.
• In official English versions of Umamusume: Cinderella Gray, the translators seem to go out of their way to purposefully avoid using the word "Christmas" at any point in the English script, instead opting for more vague references to "the holidays" in their place, even though the word "Christmas" is still clearly audible in the Japanese audio, it is very obvious that the characters are celebrating Christmas, and one sign still clearly reads "Christmas Party" in katakana despite the subtitles translating it as "Holiday Party".
• Mappa's 2024 Animated Adaptation of Ranma ½ attracted controversy for this, with a clear intention of downplaying various gender-based negative terminology, such as Akane refering to Ranma as being perverted for his Sex Shifter curse. One infamous example is in the fourth episode, which has a scene where Ryoga calls Ranma girly for complaining about battle damage to his shirt; this enrages Ranma, who responds with the vitriolic reply of "Ore no doko ga onna da". This literally translates as "Where about me is a woman", which would more smoothly translate into English as an outraged "who are you calling a girl?!", as in the original 1989 Animated Adaptation. Mappa instead translated it into English as "Who says liking clothes is girly?!", which bears no relation to the original line and is clearly done to avoid the connotation that boys should get mad for being likened to girls.

• The first German translator Rolf Kauka of the Asterix comics in the 1960s, under the name Siggi und Barbarras, made a few rather controversial changes. The little village in Brittany was moved to the Rhine and renamed "Bonhalla" (a pun on the German capital Bonn and Walhalla), the Roman occupiers from Natolien spoke with an American accent, the Goths spoke in red letters to imply that they were Dirty Communists, and there were frequent references to German politics (both West and East). The translation generally had a rather right-wing (read: Nazi revisionist) slant. Goscinny and Uderzo were not amused and terminated their contract with Kauka and commissioned a new, more faithful and much beloved translation. Kauka would go on to publish his own comic series Fritze Blitz and Dunnerkiel, which was clearly inspired by Asterix - in fact, Fritze Blitz and Dunnerkiel were renamed Siggi and Barbarras as early as the second issue.
• A Brazilian localization of a Batman comic had the variety that adds political bias. The translator translated "Nasty", a general insult, as a specific political slur regarding people of a certain Brazilian political party. Since the editor responsible is affiliated with a magazine well-known in Brazil for utterly hating said political party and since there's several simpler ways to translate the word into Portuguese it's clear that this trope was in play.
• Another from Brazil: in an issue of Daredevil where Kingpin was elected mayor of New York on a populist platform with a lot of fake news the editor translated the phrase "Fisk rules" on the sign of one of his voters as "Fisk mito". "Mito" (meaning "myth") is a well-known nickname for Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right Brazilian president who is often accused of having been elected by riding a populist wave and spreading fake news.

• Garfield is probably one of the least politically charged comic strips in existence. Despite this, one Norwegian translation team that worked on it back in the 80's kept insisting that Straw Loser Jon subscribes to Klassekampen, a well-known left-wing newspaper.

• The Finnish subtitles for The LEGO Batman Movie turned Alfred's one-liner about getting "Union-Jacked" into an out of left field reference to Brexit.
• Madagascar: In the scene where the monkeys escape from the zoo and discuss going to the Lincoln Conference Center to throw poop at Tom Wolfe while he's holding a conference, one foreign dub replaces Wolfe with Bill Clinton. Another dub changed it to Hillary Clinton.

• The Franco Regime had a board of censors to make sure Spaniards weren't exposed to foreign filth and dangerous political ideas. This extended to movie dubbing, and some efforts of the censors are still legendary in Spain, the most egregious one being turning the protagonists of the adulterous affair in Mogambo to an innocent-looking brother and sister, making their visually hinted relationship incestuous instead in a spectacular backfire. Another straightforwardly political one was omitting Rick's past as a fighter for the Spanish Republic in Casablanca.
• There is an old German dub from the 1950s of Casablanca, which bizarrely excises all references to Nazism and cuts those scenes that would have been obvious even without the dialogue. Thankfully a later dub was made that is more faithful to the original.
• The Italian dub of Flash Gordon (1980) adds one line about workers' strikes for no reason in particular.
• The Italian dub of Monty Python and the Holy Grail has replaced the humour with near-incomprehensible political jokes.
• Michael Wood's In Search of Alexander documentary, following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, gets a subtle one in thanks to a pointed translation of his Greek guide Arrian. When Wood reaches what he believes to be the site of the famous Battle of Gaugamela in Iraq, he gets out his copy of Arrian and describes Alexander's preparations for war - most prominently offering up prayers to the gods Phobos and Deimos for their aid the next day. Traditionally Phobos and Deimos are translated as something like "fear" and "panic" or "terror" and "disarray", but here, in the middle of Iraq, not long after the end of the second Gulf War, Wood chooses to translate them as "shock and awe"...

In General:

• During the reign of Henry VIII in England, this was a tool that powerful people used frequently to get their point across in a way that was seen as graceful. When Henry was trying to divorce his first wife Catherine and replace her with Anne Boleyn (who allied herself with the Protestants as part of her effort to become queen), both of them commissioned scholars to translate certain books from Latin, and Italian poetry that was in vogue at the time, such as Petrarch, and they chose books that presented ideas that made their cases look favorable. These weren't books unheard of in English — for example, one such book that Catherine sought to commission was one that she already owned copies of in English, Latin, and her native language of Spanish — but having her name on a new (and somewhat skewed) translation as patron would boost her cause. This collection came to be known as Collectanea satis copiosa.
• Mirabai Starr is an interspiritual writer who translated the works of Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross, all of whom are Catholic writers. In her translations, she takes liberties with some of the most distinctly Christian aspects of the texts by softening the language a bit, like substituting "missing the mark" and "transgression" for "sin", "the spirit of evil" for "devil", "our spiritual community" for "the Church" and "our faith", and more. Her aim is to show that the mystical insights of their works are relevant even beyond a strictly Catholic framework.

By Text:

• Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf is a consciously feminist revision of a classical poem, and she took some liberties in her translation to give the text such a slant. Most obviously, Grendel's mother, usually assumed to be a hideous monster like Grendel himself, is spoken of simply as a ferocious warrior woman. This is because the word "aglæca" can be used homonymously to mean "bringer of trouble, evil spirit, wretch, monster, demon, fierce enemy" or "great hero, mighty warrior"; Grendel and other creatures are called "aglæca", and Beowulf, very clearly a human, is also called "aglæca" at two points. Grendel's mother is called its derivative, "aglæc-wif", which can mean "female monster" or "destruction-bringing woman"; Headley opted for the latter definition by portraying her as a ferocious warrior woman. Headley also renders "lof-dǽdum", the literal meaning of which is "worthy deeds" or "praiseworthy deeds", as "privilege" (which, for the record, is "freols").
• Pasquier Quesnel, a Jansenist priest wrote a book entitled "Le Nouveau Testament en Français avec des réflexions morales sur chaque verset", which is a Jansenist commentary on the New Testament. The commentary on the Gospels was translated into English as "The Gospels: With Moral Reflections on Each Verse" by a Protestant clergyman named Richard Russell, who claimed that the commentary contained "popish" errors; these passages were left out and appended at the end of the last volume.
• In 397-8 AD, Rufinus of Aquileia translated into Latin Origen of Alexandria's On First Principles (ca. 220-30 AD), a foundational work of Christian theology. While he affirms in his prefaces that he added nothing of his own but rather restored Origen's material, he also openly admits to omitting passages he thought were interpolations inserted by later heretics, while rephrasing, tweaking, and clarifying other sections by drawing extensively from Origen's other writings to better align with what he saw as Origen's authentic, orthodox views, all with the aim of rehabilitating him as an orthodox Christian thinker for a late 4th-century audience. This included addressing and softening ideas that were later deemed heretical, like the pre-existence of the soul, eternal creation of the world, and ultimate salvation of all intelligent creatures (apokatastasis). St. Jerome condemned this as dishonest tampering and produced a more literal translation, now lost and surviving only in fragments. The original Greek survives only in excerpts from Books 3.1 and 4.1–3 in the Philocalia (an anthology of Origen's texts compiled by Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus) along with a few minor quotations elsewhere.
• St. Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva, wrote Introduction to the Devout Life, a book in which he counsels the Christian reader on how to live a holy and blessed life. It was well-received in Catholic and Protestant circles, and one translation by William Nicholls, a 17th century Protestant theologian, edited out what he perceived to be errors from the "popish" edition.
• C. S. Lewis's Miracles was translated into Japanese by a Baptist translator who Bowdlerized a few passages to make it seem as though Lewis was The Teetotaler and a non-smoker. Lewis suspected that the changes were made on doctrinal grounds that he didn't agree with— in person, Lewis was an Anglican who was an avid beer drinker and pipe smoker.
• The Polish translation of Tony Judt's opus magnum Postwar was released in Poland with one section filled with the publisher's comments on particular excerpts. Although the text proper remained faithful to the original, quite a few notes and observations made in said comments may appear somewhat unnecessary if not downright political in nature. Aside from correcting genuine historical mistakes, most of them obviously relating to Polish history, the publisher does shove their two cents into, for instance, some of Judt's less than enthusiastic remarks on Pope John Paul II, calling those "controversial at best".
• Like the Bible, the Quran is equally at the mercy of translators. The American Muslim explicitly warns mosques against accepting "free" copies of Quran translations. One in particular, the Hilali-Khan translation, wears its agenda almost literally on its sleeve with the seventh verse of the very first chapter inserting a Take That! against Jews and Christians that was not in the original text, and it warps, censors, and annotates things further from there.
  This translation may have been "free" monetarily, but there is certainly a high price to pay for such an extremist interpretation.
• Paweł Łęczycki - a 17th century Polish Bernadine monk - was the translator of Giovanni Botero's travelogue Relazioni universali. Apart from fixing some of Botero's errors in the sections relating to Poland, Łęczycki also seemingly added some content reflecting his biases—e.g. in a listing of Greater Poland's major cities he added a bunch of cities which happened to house Bernardine convents, and in the section on Russia he put in a bunch of mean jabs at the country.
• While the book has never been translated fully, at least some of the controversy regarding The Satanic Verses in the Arabic speaking world can be attributed to the fact that the title was sometimes deliberately translated using the word "ayat", which specifically means the verses of the Quran as opposed to its more general English title.
• Bernal Diaz's The True History of the Conquest of Mexico provides both a straight and a meta example of this trope. It is a first-hand account and memoir of Cortez's expedition to Mexico - written by a senior NCO who spent most of his time hanging out with the translators and infantry. It presents a much earthier version of the incidents than Cortez's official history. In addition to mentioning a few times where the translators (who were often pulled from rival tribes) pulled off this trope against Cortez or their rivals with varying degrees of success, the book itself fell victim as well. The original manuscript copy was filed in the government archives in Peru, and prepared for print after Diaz's death by a Mercredian friar. Who promptly took the opportunity to insert Mercredians into major historical events, alter the sizes and timings of battles to make them seem more important, and the like. The original text was only found and correctly translated in the 1990s.

• Any modern translations of the Hebrew Bible done by Jews are going to have a lot less Jesus symbolism than Christians might be used to in their Old Testament. It's possible that some of these might be due to legitimate linguistic shift as with the Greek version called the Septuagint which predates Jesus by three centuries and was translated by Jewish scholars of Alexandria for Greek-speaking Jews, such as whether Isaiah was prophesying a "virgin" or a "young woman" when describing the messiah's birth. The Hebrew term in the Isaiah passage is almah which means a young woman of marriageable age and virginity is implied (as with other uses elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible), but the exact word for virgin is bethulah. The Septuagint translates almah in Greek as parthenos which explicitly means virgin. The Septuagint is what the Christian gospels, written in Greek, records Jesus quoting.
• Isaiah has many examples, as many translators over the centuries have found it irresistible to retroactively tinker with the prophecies to fit Christian dogma a little better. For example, the Hebrew uses the word messiah to refer to both the prophecised Messiah and King Cyrus of Persia, a ruler popular with the Jewish population for encouraging freedom of religion, but many translations choose to Translate the Loanwords, Too when referring unambiguously to Cyrus, calling him 'the one anointed by God', while using the loan word in all other cases.
• The Tyndale Bible is one of the first English translations of the Bible, and the first to be based directly on the Hebrew and Greek texts, though it drew heavily from the Vulgate. Famously, St. Thomas More was one of the many Catholics who charged this translation of promoting heresy, citing how the terms "church", "priest", "do penance" and "charity" became in the Tyndale translation "congregation", "senior" (changed to "elder" in the revised edition of 1534), "repent", and "love", respectively. Not helping is the fact that the Tyndale Bible's notes attacked the Church.
• Speaking of English translations of the Bible, the Geneva Bible was infamously biased in favor of the type of Calvinism embraced by the vast majority of Puritans. This fact, plus the fact that the other, state-sanctioned translation was of less than satisfactory quality, helped pave the way for the King James Version in the first place. Though a bit of royal Executive Meddling regarding the rules for translators (reproduced here) insisted on keeping in the "old ecclesiastical words", presumably to not rock the boat of the status quo too much. So for example we have "charity" for "love", "church" instead of congregation/gathering/assembly, "bishop" (when the Greek word is literally translated "overseer"), "baptize" (the Greek word meaning to immerse, which might upset those in favor of sprinkling) etc.
• And of course, the King James Bible itself is an example. Deliberate changes include removing "Puritan influence," any mentions that James considered insulting or undermining to the Divine Right of Kings, any support for civil disobedience against monarchies, and any suggestion that a just King should execute his family members for their crimes. He also demanded that the translation reinforce the policies of the Church of England as opposed to the Catholic Church, including the use of Church of England-specific terminology. Despite mandating the use of the Bishop's Bible as the foundation for his translation, James also ordered that any elements of the Bishop's Bible he considered "problematic" would be replaced with any other translation that supported his agenda.
• A New Testament example is the common practice of translating the Greek word "doulos" as "servant" when it meant "slave". The New Testament has a lot of casual and uncritical references to slaves, but slavery is nowadays considered abhorrent. At the time it was simply matter-of-fact. One major exception to this is the Legacy Standard Bible translation, whose foreword explicitly states it consistently translates "doulos" as slave, and any instances of it using the word "servant" are when the original word in question is something other than "doulos."
• The Temperance Bible altered every instance of Jesus drinking wine to drinking grape juice. Every other mention of wine is retranslated "grape juice", unless someone is getting drunk off it or condemning it. ^note This is particularly egregious considering that before pasteurization was invented, grape juice didn't really exist - pressed grapes begin to ferment almost immediately due to the wild yeasts that live on their skins, and will generally be alcoholic enough to cause intoxication within forty-eight hours. The Wedding at Cana most certainly did not feature Welch's.
• The ending salutation in Romans 16 references Junia, a female deacon or church leader. Some English Bibles render this name as "Junias" in an attempt to make it masculine and disguise the fact that some early church leaders were women. However, nearly every major English translation done since the 1980s has accepted Junia as the likely correct rendering. And even among older translations, there was genuine question over whether the name was supposed to be male or female (the difference comes down to only whether a small accent mark is present at the end of the Greek letters or not, something that could have faded away on some old manuscripts): one example of this among contemporaries is the King James Version of 1611 using "Junia," while the Douay-Rheims Bible of only one year earlier from 1610 uses "Junias."
• The word "baal" literally means "lord", "master" or "Husband" in various Semitic and Arabic languages (including Early Hebrew). At some point, a translator, possibly attempting to brush Baal worship completely out of Hebrew history, changed all instances of baal to bosheth ("shame") in order to write out the name of Baal, including in names where the word was literally intended as "Lord" in unambiguous reference to YHWH — so Saul's son Eshbaal ("great is the lord") became Ishbosheth ("great is the shame"), Jonathan's son Meribaal ("from the mouth of the lord") became Mephibosheth ("from the mouth of shame"), etc. This carries through to most Bibles and Scriptures with the exception of scholarly works.
• 1 Samuel 20 writes that David and Jonathan kissed and wept when they had to say goodbye to one another. A kiss would not have been an unusual gesture between two friends in a tender moment in that place and time period, so most translations leave it in. However, many conservative modern translations specify that the two friends kissed each other's cheeks—a detail not mentioned in the original Hebrew—to avoid mental imagery the translators considered problematic. The Living Bible goes further, and dispenses with translation issues altogether by simply bowdlerising the passage to "and they sadly shook hands".
• Ecclesiastes 11:2 is usually translated along the lines of "Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth" (ESV), one of many times the Bible urges those with wealth to spend it supporting the community. The NIV translates it as "Invest in seven ventures, yes, in eight; you do not know what disaster may come upon the land" and continues the verse by urging people to diversify a stock portfolio. It goes without saying that the particular economic system being justified there did not exist at the pre-feudal time Ecclesiastes was written, and would, in fact, have been considered sinful under Old Testament money handling laws. The NIV is an American translation from the Cold War era, so imagining King Solomon as a wise investor rather than as a wise man of generosity had a political motivation.
• The Song of Songs has a controversy over a line from the Beloved that would be literally translated from Hebrew as "I am black and beautiful". Many translations change it to something along the lines of "although I am black, I am beautiful". The context of the scene is that the Beloved is tanned dark because her brothers have forced her to work in the sun all day, thus changing her to be against Hebrew beauty standards, making this change a little less offensive; but the Hebrew had her insisting her black skin was a part of her beauty, while many translations made in times of racism and colorism had her claim her beauty despite her dark skin.
• The Conservative Bible Project was a largely unsuccessful attempt to retranslate parts of the Bible that would be considered "liberal" in the mind of its project leader, who also happens to be the creator of the notorious Conservapedia. Even some hard-core conservatives found this to be rather blasphemous. It didn't get very far, mostly due to people with the necessary expertise to translate the Bible refusing to go along with the project's agenda.
• The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society for the Jehovah's Witnesses, has been described as a literal translation (which is good if you want something near the original text) whose some parts have been translated to support the theological opinions of the Watch Tower such as denying Jesus's divinity, the use of a stake instead of a cross and translating "Kyrios" as "Jehovah."
• The New International Version of the Bible has been accused of giving the text an evangelical slant, with the Protestant scholar N.T. Wright saying that the translation obscures what St. Paul the Apostle is writing about. Other criticisms include its inconsistent translation of "paradosis" (παράδοσις), which literally means "tradition". Critics, usually Catholics and Orthodox Christians, point out how "paradosis" is translated as "teaching" when "paradosis" is spoken of favorably, e.g., 2 Thessalonians 2:15, but "tradition" when spoken of negatively, like in Matthew 15:6, the underlying implication being that tradition as a whole is a bad thing.
• Exodus 21:22-25, regarding the legal consequences for battering a pregnant woman: The original translation of the passage going back to 1382, corroborated by Jewish interpretation, includes "and soothly he maketh the child dead-born" or, in 20th-century English, "so that she has a miscarriage". But during the 1970s and 80s, this suddenly became "so that she gives birth prematurely". The 2015 Amplified Bible is especially egregious, not only excising "miscarriage" from the previous revision but inserting the parenthetical "and the baby lives".

• The edition of Carmen (1875) prepared in 1964 by Fritz Oeser is notorious for not only restoring musical material deleted during or before the original rehearsals but also for liberally rewriting the stage directions to emphasize the OTP of Carmen and Escamillo.

By Translation Software:

• A script editor for the Dynamic-Designs Fan Translation group known as Wildbill is fairly notorious for this kind of thing, having a nasty habit of inserting obnoxious far-right political screeds into the scripts he did the editing work for. One-text-box lines of dialogue are often expanded into several boxes worth of ranting about how looters are good-for-nothing leeches on society, or how government-provided healthcare is a terrible idea, or whatever chip Wildbill had on his shoulder that week. Proof we're not making this up: the obscure SNES Eastern RPG Shell Monster Story (Daikaijū Monogatari) was altered to insert rants against single payer healthcare, turning the villains into "socialists" and the ACLU, and having the villain defeated by the power of the villagers' faith in Jesus Christ. Perhaps surprisingly, none of this originally featured in a Japanese-made game about hermit crabs from 1994.

By Title:

• Brigandine: Grand Edition for the original PlayStation received a somewhat infamous fan translation that was written and programmed by a conservative Christian, whose faith bled over into his work. All references to Christian theology or magic — even benign, non-religious terms like the "Vampire Lord" enemy — were removed or renamed (and Japanese fantasy isn't lacking in either). An item originally known as "Missing Link" was also renamed due to the evolution reference. Even the final boss Ouroboros became "Jormungandr", apparently due to the original name's connection to the cycle of death and reincarnation.
• In the English and Chinese localizations of Ghostwire: Tokyo, one line of dialogue said by KK in the original Japanese dialog, where he vaguely replies with some form of "who knows, really" in response to Akito asking if the bow he was holding had been obtained by theft, was replaced with a political "all property is theft, kid." (EN) and "The world belongs to the people" (CN)◊. Notably, Bethesda responded to the backlash in the Spider's Thread update a year later by having both lines rewritten and re-recorded so that it's closer to the original.
• The English localization of Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness rewrites one dialogue exchange to include snark about the Cultural Translation and Always Male practices that were not hinted at in the source text.
  Original lines: -When will I meet this gentlemen? - He's already nearby... Please join forces with him... and save Magical Land...
  English lines: -Champion? How will I recognize her? -This is the 80's, hon. It's a him. And he's white. Except when he's Asian. It's complicated.
• A Russian hacked Fan Translation of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories cut missions for being too violent and translates dialogue as nonsensical Author Tract segments about the author's extreme-right, straight-edge, anti-video game political views. Dageron, the translator, is regarded in the Russian gaming community as a notorious kook who ruins games, which is annoying as Russian gaming stores regularly sell his versions.
• One Fan Translation of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light turns a handful of late-game villagers into Author Avatars who rant about how the post-Wii Fire Emblem games are "trash anime games that miss the point of the franchise." This was removed from later updates following backlash.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, there's very heavy subtext in the original dialogue, thanks to specific pronoun use, that the person most special to Sora that Naminé is replacing in his memories isn't in fact Kairi, but Riku. When Sora meets the other kids in his memory of the Destiny Islands, the pronoun they use for his 'special person' is aitsu (アイツ). The pronoun is casual and gender neutral but more masculine leaning (think of referring to someone as 'guy', regardless of gender), and it's generally considered rude/insulting to use the pronoun towards a girl. When Sora realizes Naminé has been tampering with his memories, she uses neutral pronouns to describe the person most special to him. However, in both Japanese and English, Sora assumes she means Kairi. But the full extent of Sora's misunderstanding is all but lost in the English translation, as it translates aitsu to feminine pronouns. In fact, the last time Sora sees the Riku Replica, he refers to him by aitsu in Japanese, but in English, just calls out his name instead. There is an attempt in the English translation of the Chain of Memories novel to rectify this at least, as the subtext from the game is mostly preserved, while also going further and implying that the memory of the meteor shower promise Naminé tampers with was actually between Sora and Riku. You can read about it in more detail here. In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora also uses aitsu to refer to Riku, when he sees him at the top of the mountain in The Land of Dragons. This time, it's translated more accurately to "That guy..."
  • Kingdom Hearts III:
    • In the original Japanese dialogue, when Riku and Mickey are in the Dark World for the first time, Mickey says Riku has found the strength to protect his 'precious person' (taisetsu na hito), very obviously implied to be Sora. This scene comes directly after one with Hercules saying Megara is his own precious person. After a flashback of receiving the Keyblade from Terra, Riku then says to himself, "[Is this] the strength to protect the person most precious to me...?" However, in the English dub, Mickey and Riku both say 'to protect what matters' instead, while Hercules says 'the person I love most' about Megara, so the parallel and implication are completely lost (even if we as the audience can still decipher that Sora is the reason for Riku's growth and character development). To top it off, the KH3 Ultimania entry about Riku also uses precious 'person' instead of 'things'. It seems Riku's wish has deliberately evolved from when he was a child, but that important bit of character development got no homoed out of several different official KHIII English translations.
      Image Text: A young Riku stated his wish: “I want to become strong enough to protect the things that matter.” Roughly 10 years later, after many twists and turns, he has finally obtained the strength to protect the person who matters.
    • Taisetsu (precious/cherished) is once again used during a scene with Sora and Riku. In Japanese, Sora says, "You really cherish Elsa...", when speaking with Anna in Arendelle, while in English he says, "I'm sure she knows how much you love her." Sora then thinks to himself in Japanese, "It's the same as when Riku disappeared before. It's surely because he cherishes me that he wouldn't let us be together." In English, it's translated as "It's just like when Riku disappeared. He thought he had to push me away, to protect me." This means taisetsu has been translated twice to 'love' in English... except for when it comes to how Riku feels about Sora.
    • When visiting the video game store at Galaxy Toys, Sora sees Yozora (the character Rex thinks he's a toy of) for the first time and says, "Well, I never looked this good." And... Yozora looks exactly like Riku. Which Sora acknowledges himself in a social media post.◊ As it turns out, in Japanese, Donald actually says "Very good-looking, huh." after Goofy says Yozora looks like Riku. Given the context, he's teasing Sora about saying someone who looks like Riku is good-looking. But, once again, it seems to have been mistranslated that the subject is Sora in English. Also, in the original Japanese text of the aforementioned social media post, Sora says he feels a connection to Yozora because he looks like Riku.
  • Kingdom Hearts III has many scenes between Sora and Kairi affected by this:
    • Near the end of the game Kairi manages to help keep Sora from fading away when his and their companions' lives are endangered. In Japanese, Sora recognizes how strong Kairi really is for doing this (as no one else had managed to maintain themselves, let alone themself and another person), and says, "Yappari tsuyoi na, Kairi wa!" (You're strong, Kairi, just as I thought!) In English, either as a mistake or as a misguided attempt to provide some more Ship Tease between the two, Sora tells Kairi that he feels strong when he's with her. Unfortunately, this only serves to downplay a rare moment of Kairi showing off her capabilities, and denies Sora a chance to acknowledge them. It's also possible this was done due to Kairi being a more divisive character in the West and the Western views of strength being more... "masculine". As a result, a rather vocal portion of the fanbase tends to view Kairi as a Damsel Scrappy. The translators may have assumed the original line was going to stoke up some ire from Western players and went with a line that still managed to fit the situation.
    • Another scene that is translated to be more romantic is them sharing paopu fruit. In Japanese, Kairi says, "This charm will make sure we won’t be separated (again)." And in English, she says, "I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That’s all." The latter has clear romantic connotations, while the former could very well be read as simply platonic, in the same vein of Kairi giving Sora her Wayfinder back in the original Kingdom Hearts.
    • Yet another scene is translated to be more romantic, this time at the end of the game when Sora gives his speech about getting Kairi back. In Japanese, he says, "This time for sure I expected we could go home together... but Kairi wasn’t in this place (realm)." Meanwhile, in English, he says, "I thought we'd finally be together. But she's out there, alone." And clearly there's a very big difference between coming home together and being together.
    • The original Japanese dialogue of Sora's conversation with the Nameless Star more or less confirms that while Kairi is the reason Sora retains his body, Riku is the reason his heart survived. Meanwhile, in English, Riku's role in saving Sora is somewhat... downplayed.
  • In Kingdom Hearts χ, the Arc Words "We'll go together" were seemingly mistranslated as "We'll make those dreams come true, Belle", in a scene very clearly paralleling Belle and the Beast (now the Prince) with Sora and Riku.^note This isn't the first time the parallel has appeared, by the way.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The English localization for the "Special Delivery" quest portrays Finley and Sasan's relationship as reciprocally romantic, something lacking in the Japanese version, and inserts entire sentences of dialogue in an attempt to justify the romance as being OK on the grounds of Finley (a Zora child) being older than Sasan (an adult Hylian).
• The English localization of NEO: The World Ends with You caught some flack when a few instances of this were discovered.
  • When MKN discovers grafitti depicting the 104 building, in the Japanese version she decides to paint over it just because she doesn't like it. In the English version however, she considers the grafitti to be glorifying capitalism and decides to cover it up for that reason.
  • Another example occurs while Ken Doi is eating curry. In the original Japanese version he simply wonders if Japanese-made curry would be considered inauthentic, while in the English translation he wonders if Japanese-made curry counts as cultural appropriation.
• Paper Mario: The Origami King was controversial for inserting many jokes that seemed to be making fun of fans who thought the games were too reliant on meta humor and generic-looking Toads.
  • The game opens with a sequence of a Goomba repeatedly talking about how excited he is to see a Toad and that he's never seen one before. In the original Japanese version, he simply wonders what sort of food he'll be served and his "I never got to see Toad" line is just him making ominous sounds at Mario.
  • The sequence where Olivia thanks a "random unnamed staff-member Toad" in Shogun Studios did not have the meta angle in the original Japanese version.
  • The COVID-19 joke ("Wash your hands. Seriously, wash your hands.") had the second sentence be "Do not leave food scraps lying around the kitchen." in the Japanese version.
• The English translation of World Heroes 2 adds an extra sentence to the end of Neo Geegus's victory line, turning it into a political joke:

• In Umamusume: Pretty Derby's official English version, the translators seem to go out of their way to avoid explicitly mentioning "Christmas" by name at any point in the English script, instead opting for more vague references to "the holidays" in their place, even though the word "Christmas" is still clearly audible in the Japanese audio and it is very obvious that the characters are celebrating Christmas.
  • It is especially egregious in one infamous scene in "Hungry for a Miracle", where Santa Claus is unmistakably present and a song where the word "Christmas" occurs several times in its lyrics can clearly be heard.
  • Another notable instance is a scene where a character mentions Valentine's Day and New Year's by name, but Christmas is still referred to as simply "the holidays" in the English script.

• DRAMAtical Murder: The fan translation for re:connect was made by a team who hated Mink and deliberately translated his route, which already deals with a Troubled Abuser, to be much worse in terms of Aoba's consent and Mink's abuse towards him. This caused the overseas fanbase as a whole to despise Mink. A decade later, while Mink is still the least-liked of the love interests, he isn't as widely loathed anymore due to a less biased translation being available.

• In his Let's Play of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption after having railed against Yoshio Sakamoto for Metroid: Other M in earlier videos of the LP, slowbeef translated his producers log as thus:
  "Hello, this is Yoshio Sakomoto! It's not easy writing stories for Metroid considering my functional illiteracy. Honestly, I don't really like Samus, and I don't want you to like her either. I hate her and feel threatened by her. I will ruin this franchise. I'm just coming out and telling you. Fuck Metroid and fuck you."
• The Type-Moon wiki contains mistranslations and has Fanon implemented into numerous pages, with any attempt at correction swiftly reverted. EGGS, the sole admin, is derided by the TYPE-MOON fanbase as spreading disinformation, which is an issue as the wiki is generally the first to appear on search results due to SEO.

• The unofficial Arabic dubs of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) make heavy edits to the series to make it conform to traditional Islamic values. This includes cutting out all of the background music, as instrumental music is often considered haram within traditional circles. As such, the opening theme is replaced with a nasheed. Thankfully, the officially authorized Spacetoon dubs are nowhere as strict.
• The Italian dub of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power downplays Netossa and Spinnerella's marriage by changing their dialogue so that they explicitly refer to each other with platonic terms.
• The many unofficial Persian dubs of SpongeBob SquarePants tend to edit Sandy and every other bikini-clad character so that their clothes conform to Islamic dress, if they don't just blur their bodies altogether. The name of Bikini Bottom is also changed.

• When coming up with a word in Inuktitut (one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada) for "uranium", a translator who obviously had some personal views regarding nuclear energy rendered it as "rock that kills", vastly overstating the danger of basic uranium, and that term was used for some time before it was realized what had been done.
• The infamous national anthem of Nazi Germany "Das Deutschlandlied" begins with the lines "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles / über alles in der Welt". This is usually translated as something along the lines of "Germany, Germany above all others / above all others in the world!"; however, the original German is a bit more ambiguous. You can interpret it as either "Germany above all (to me)" i.e. Germany should come as the first priority to its people or "Germany above all else" (i.e. Germany is the best thing in the world and everything/one else should bow down to it). Hofman von Fallersleben, the author of the lyrics, almost certainly intended the former meaning, as he was an advocate for uniting all the petty feudal states into one Germany, but both the Nazis and Antinazi propaganda during the war naturally chose to interpret it in the latter sense.
• The Dutch Christian-run broadcasting group Evangelische Omroep (EO) was the subject of controversy after it edited the David Attenborough series The Life of Mammals to remove content that was not in line with their creationist viewpoints. Attenborough was not happy about it.
• In some languages, the word for waterboarding more literally translates to 'water torture'; for example, the Finnish vesikidutus or the Japanese mizu-zeme. To speakers of those languages, the debate often heard in American media over whether waterboarding counts as torture comes off as hilarious as a result.
• Travel show host Rick Steves visited and taped shows in Iran at invitation of the Iranian government and with the permission of the US State Department in the Oughts. He relates how he wondered what his taxi driver was saying in the middle of bad traffic in Tehran and wound up having a big "aha moment" when he learned what it was in literal translation: "death to traffic!" He described that made him realize the oft-repeated slogan "death to America" attributed to Iranians, even if technically accurate translation, might not actually mean in Farsi what it seems to mean in English, that "death to X" might be a more common, mundane expression.