'Engrish' messages

[Juan F. Ramirez]

The most known phase is the 'Congraturation! You Sucsess!' message at the end of Stop the Express.

But these days I've come across this one, curiously spotted now after 30 years:



'Corperation'...

Do you know of any other linguistic mistakes?

[Sokurah]

'Corperation'...

I don't really see this is an example of engrish though.
This is more likely done by someone who didn't look up the correct spelling and just misspelled the word.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

'Corperation'...

I don't really see this is an example of engrish though.
This is more likely done by someone who didn't look up the correct spelling and just misspelled the word.

Maybe I was wrong when saying 'Engrish' (in fact I have a wrong idea of it).

We'd better speak of mispellings.

[Alessandro]

"Engrish" means improper use of English by Japanese native speakers; there is no clear distinction between the "r" and "l" sounds in Japanese, hence the word.

Since Hudson Soft was the only Japanese company to produce software for the Spectrum, and to my knowledge there are no occurrences of "Engrish" in its games, it is unlikely you will find any examples of it in the Spectrum world.

Maybe you were looking for spelling errors in Spectrum games?

[Ast A. Moore]

Yeah, that’s just a typo/misspelling. There were tons of them in commercial Spectrum games. Primarily, missing apostrophes, commas, and spaces. I fixed one in Soldier of Fortune (the phrase “THANK YOU, ADVENTURER” was spelled “THANKYOU ADVENTURER”).

[Ralf]

I wouldn't expect much "Engrish" in software coming from UK

But there is a lot of bad English in titles coming from elsewhere. Don't forget, these programs were often
written by teenagers who only started to learn English.

For example there is a quite good Dizzy fan game called "Home Iceland Dizzy". We had a discussion about
it some time ago. It seems that the author acually meant "island" not "iceland"

[flatduckrecords]

Tom Scott posted an interesting video about this particular type of misspelling (the "schwa" vowel) recently:
Ə: The Most Common Vowel in English
In many English words the vowel sounds like "uh" but the spelling can be any of a, e, i, o, or u!

[akeley]

I'm sure there are some "Engrish" examples in other languages too...after all there were plenty of ZX games coming from non-English speaking countries.

In fact it's one of my favourite things when reading cracktros text on Amiga or C64

[p13z]

Full Throttle 2 features "Donnington" racetrack - which is a different place in the UK to "Donington", which is where Donington Park Raceway is situated.
A similar mistake when using Google weather forecasts once lead to some very unfortunate tyre selection at a race meeting :/

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Maybe you were looking for spelling errors in Spectrum games?

Exactly, it was my idea, wrongly set out

[Alessandro]

Cyrox, written by Grant Jaquest - probably the Ed Wood of the Spectrum world - shows several spelling and grammar errors and absent punctuation in the in-game instructions:

"valueable"
"there whereabouts"
"enermy"
"robots which although stupidly follow set patterns of movement will cause death"
"cystals"
"you battle armour"

The game itself is as appalling as its instructions!

Although it is not found in software, I also remember a "you're every move" in the advertising for Total Recall.

[Hank Scorpio]

Interceptor Micro's - I don't know if the apostrophe was intensional or not.

[TMD2003]

As I've just found this thread lurking in the (barely a month-old) archives, can we count La Pugly Ugly: The Journey Longest, seeing as it was (a) CSSCGC and (b) very obviously done on purpose?

[StooB]

"Gun Jamed" instead of "Gun Jammed" really annoys me in Hewson's Marauder.

[Ast A. Moore]

"Gun Jamed" instead of "Gun Jammed" really annoys me in Hewson's Marauder.

Yeah, or “Loose Life.”

I have a typo-free version here, if anyone’s interested. (The bug fix was so easy, I just couldn’t resist it.)