Well, honestly, I remember from my early-on translating attempts that I oftentimes would start grabbing for the dictionary and fumbling to cobble things together that sounded good when I realized I was entirely unsure what somebody was talking about. (It's a rather nasty feeling when somebody expects you to know what a speech bubble says and you don't. Bit like showing up at the Fire Palace only to realize the Fire Lord is sixty feet tall and you haven't any pants on, really.) I think I once managed to translate the scene where Scar tells Winry to get off the battlefield if she isn't going to buck up and fight, as some sort of compliment on her Joan of Arc-like courage, because I didn't have the guts to just admit I couldn't understand the idiom he was using. So I expect that's where some of the literalism comes from--too much dictionary, not enough grammar savvy or the confidence to fess up to confusion and ask a native.
I think my favorite translator's flub, though, is when they start mucking about with transliterating katakana without doing a quick Google or something first. I will never forget the first few episodes of fansubbed FMA I watched, where they called Lust and Gluttony "Rast" and "Blatny". Even the official manga translation rendered the nation of Kuserukusesu as Cselkcess, when a bit of asking around can tell you that there was once a Persian king named Xerxes who had a consort named Amestris. (Somehow they got the country of Amestris right, but not the other one...)
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timeasmymeasure
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I think my favorite translator's flub, though, is when they start mucking about with transliterating katakana without doing a quick Google or something first. I will never forget the first few episodes of fansubbed FMA I watched, where they called Lust and Gluttony "Rast" and "Blatny". Even the official manga translation rendered the nation of Kuserukusesu as Cselkcess, when a bit of asking around can tell you that there was once a Persian king named Xerxes who had a consort named Amestris. (Somehow they got the country of Amestris right, but not the other one...)