Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3392084-20130707145759/@comment-4807396-20130709220638

Yeah, that was definitely lost in the translation and just comes off as random gibberish in the English dub.

Another, more minor thing that didn't come across right was one of the lines Emma's parrot comes out with in MGS2; "Venus in Cancer" is a mistranslation of "Venusian Crab", which is apparently a reference to the 1956 B-movie It Conquered The World, implying Emma was a B-movie fan or just showing off Kojima's movie buff status.

In MGS3, Volgin's "Kuwabara, Kuwabara" chants make more sense in Japanese, since it's an expression equivalent to the English "knock on wood" and is believed to ward off lightning; appropriate for a guy nicknamed "Thunderbolt", don't you think?

Or what about Ocelot's nickname from the earlier games, Shalashaska? Shalashaska is the result of recursive translation, from the original Russian to Japanese to English. The original Russian term was 'Sharashka', which was a slang term for a very specific type of prison - secret labs that essentially jailed scientists and engineers and forced them to participate in scientific research and engineering projects for the state.

While the English dub (can't speaking for any of the others) is, as a whole, very good, a lot of small things like these fell through the cracks and their original meaning was lost to English-speaking audiences.