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I stumbled upon some very old and no longer used Taiwan’s Chinese translation of some G1 characters’ names, and I just had to make this chart because I couldn’t stop laughing at some of them.

This post suddenly got popular, so I thought I should mention that I made this chart quite sometime ago, and now come to think of it, Ramjet’s name’s meaning is actually closer to… lowlife.

Ramjet is Lowlife.

These back translations sound hilarious in English, so I gotta wonder… is the reverse true in Chinese? Are the literal translations of the English names so ridiculous they had to change them?

Unfortunately, yes, for quite a few iconic characters. Starscream would become something like 星星叫, which pronounces exactly like “gorilla scream” in Mandarin Chinese. It’s too silly.

I think there was an attempt to transcribe his name in Chinese characters, which made his name sound like Stacy.

Eventually, Taiwan settled for “Heaven King Star (Uranus)”. It sounds cool.

But other characters aren’t so unfortunate. For instance, Ironhide, Jazz, Soundwave and Shockwave translate well into Chinese. Jazz is double cool because guess what? It’s the same word we use for Sir, as in knighthood!

So I don’t know what they were thinking when they came up with the above translations. Thankfully these silly names are no longer used.

These names are something I could find in third party toys packaging. They’re hilarious 😂😂😂

Omfggg these could be names for FransTromers @transformers-why 😂