Of my many weird obsessions, arguably the most niche is my enjoyment of mistranslated toy packaging.
Now, as a baseline, I can glean amusement from any kind of English-language packaging produced by a company without the resources to employ a professional translator.
But with discount toys, this phenomenon reaches an awkward apotheosis.
The hunting grounds are bountiful, at home and abroad: market stalls, fairground prize shelves, discount toy shops.
As a word-nerd, my delight comes purely from exquisite, unintentional comedy or poetry. Native English speakers have launched literary careers by manufacturing these kinds of linguistic absurdities.
This activity does not imbue me with a sense of my superiority. My own halting attempts at communication in a foreign language have never extended much beyond“Où sont les WC?”
But if they were required on a more regular basis, I’m sure I would bring equal amounts of joy to a native audience, serving up a ripe egg corn on a daily basis.
With those caveats out of the way, here are the five hallmarks of great mistranslated discount toy packaging.
And if you’re ever having trouble writing an email, remember this: somewhere out there is a copywriter working in a second language, straining to come up with four separate pedagogic attributes for a plastic hamburger stand.
1) General levels of tweeness
Look at enough of these pastel toy boxes and you’ll notice the pervasive and overbearing focus on cuteness.
Perhaps this is because these products are manufactured in an area of the world increasingly in thrall to the kawaii aesthetic. Or perhaps the makers just think this is what parents want.
Loveliness abounds. A Sylvanian Families knock-off is rebadged as Happy Moment: Lovely Modelling.
A doll is presented as Modern Pretty Girl: Lovely Style.
An afternoon-tea set of cutlery and pastries is simply labelled ‘TOYS Lovely.’
Even a knock-off Duplo dinosaur playset reassures the buyer that ‘the shape is cute and inspiring’.
If a toy has no anthropomorphic features, then the writer will often strain to make it sound cute nonetheless.
‘Baby’s kitchenware is very fashionable!’ protests one playset, while a package of SWAT role-play weaponry boasts ‘gorgeous lighting.’
Some attempts at personification can sound a little desperate though.
‘Happy Childhood begin from me!’ trills one toy box, adding ‘Children and I play together,’ as if a personal plea from the playset might convince a skeptical parent to take it to the checkout.
On rare occasions, this tendency toward whimsy evolves into something more lyrical.
A tagline for a toy assault rifle reads more like a couplet of Imagist poetry:
Starlight gathers energy
bursts out the best light
While a doll house named Beauty Villa Set adopts a style closer to that of e e cummings, using lower-case spellings, eccentric punctation and typographic innovation to get the point across:
Beauty
you will have happy day ! may
all your dream come true !
The more you play with
me the happier I
will be!novel style ,
2) Weird lists of attributes
Another key hallmark of mistranslated toy packaging is the urge to catalogue a wide array of tenuous or obscure benefits and features.
The undisputed classic of the genre is Suitcase Transformable Hamburger
Verbs, nouns and adjectives sit uneasily in the same menu. These attributes are frequently bulleted with icons taken from stock image libraries.
I spent more than 15 years as a magazine editor. I sympathise with those whose task is to populate text fields, just because they’re part of the design template. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t arrive ahead of your print slot.
Still, it’s difficult to avoid the occasional impression that these benefits are being oversold.
I agree that Plasticine Noodle Machine might ‘improve hands on ability’ and ‘cultivate practical ability’ but really, how robust is its claim to ‘enhance brain development’?
At other times, the sales pitch just feels exhausting.
A supermarket checkout till lists four key attributes (health, clever, happy, growth) but impulsively adds another five features below that, each with its own icon (safety, protect, clevern [sic], interest, concern).
Guys, you had us at ‘growth’!
Yet the undisputed classic of the genre is ‘Suitcase Transformable Hamburger’.
Here we encounter an overworked copywriter straining to find four substantive features in an unfamiliar context.
The list starts reasonably confidently, with Modelling: four! But laziness creeps in by the second bullet point – Playing method: various!
By the third and fourth bullets, apathy has clearly set in. Easy to receive: Receive! is followed by Easy to carry: easily!
Is it home-time yet?
3) Tone-deaf slogans
Along with the tendency toward cuteness, the packaging sometimes carries unintended hints of violence.
For instance: a make-up collection called Beauty Bomb (tagline: surprise yourself). Or the aforementioned Beauty Villa Set, with its on-box descriptions that blend mechanical and aspirational features: ‘Really Beauty Compounding’ and ‘You Are Beautiful Flashing Enter’.
Or take the more sinister-sounding Cutting Game, promoted with the ominous slogan ‘More funny to play it’.
At other times, there are departures from political correctness that might sit awkwardly with some consumers.
The tagline for Kitchen Sink is nauseating enough: ‘I want to be a good helper for Mom’. But the packaging doubles down on the Stepford Wives vibe by appending a late-capitalist descriptor: ‘Happy Labor Model’.
Time to paint that picket fence, darling!
4) Full Metal Marketing
Then there’s the highly specialised sub-genre of trying to make toy firearms sound educational.
One plastic assault rifle opines that the gun is for ‘training of the child’s agility’. Presumably, that of the younger sibling, at whom you’ll be aiming the weapon.
Another SWAT role-play set offers up that it will ‘practise the coordination ability of the hand and eyes of the children’.
(I once made an identical claim to my parents, vis a vis my four-hour-a-day Gameboy habit, and the argument hasn’t become more persuasive in the intervening decades.)
On occasion this pro-gun lobbying is accompanied by slightly worrying protestations: ‘100% safe, ZERO damaging force’.
But some manufacturers eschew such milquetoast qualifications in favour of Full Metal Marketing.
Using a distressed font you might normally associate with an energy drink or a pro-wrestling DVD, the Master Sniper assault rifle emphasises POWER and then, for greater emphasis, adds STRONG MILITARY POWER in even larger letters.
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one really improves my hand-eye coordination.
5) Misspellings and neologisms
Pointing out the myriad misspellings on toys manufactured in non-English speaking countries feels a little churlish. (If you’re interested in learning more about typos, I invite you to randomly click on any blog in my archive).
These misspellings are usually unobtrusive but on occasion they’re prominent enough to be fair game for comment. One culprit is Dessert GRiL, a singing ice-cream aficionado whose pre-translation moniker was presumably Sweet Girl.
Then there are the neologisms and substitutions that clearly made sense in the original tongue, but result in descriptive bathos when translated. For instance, directions for using brown plasticine in a toy toaster are rendered as ‘Open the bread machine lid, add color mud.’
On the flip side, the process can result in much loftier pronouncements.
A case in point: a plastic fast-food set named Gourmet: Infinited fun.
The term ‘Gourmet’ was already stretching credibility before the manufacturer minted a new word, just to underline the extent of the play opportunities.
Or take the Heroes Fighters.
They’re a confusing enough group to begin with: four Power Rangers in lucha libre masks and one web-slinging hero with a spider logo on each pectoral.
But the tagline only deepens the mystery: Super Warrior Thunderation Champion.
Thunderation is either an archaic exclamation or a rollercoaster.
I can’t say exactly what the manufacturer had in mind here, but either option seems totally on-brand for this utterly gonzo superteam.
Coda: Jurassic Plants
The usual verdict on discount toys of this kind is that they’re just cheap tat. They lack the quality or the staying power of the pricier products offered by venerable brands like Lego, Playmobil or Schleich.
And certainly, our family has acquired its fair share of unloved or easily broken plastic playware.
But there’s no accounting for taste.
Anytime my daughter visits her grandmother’s house, she immediately asks to play with the aforementioned ‘Dino Paradise’ – a set of ersatz Duplo.
In addition to building blocks, dinosaurs, rocks and foliage, that particular set came with several prehistoric anachronisms.
Also included in the box were bunches of bananas and carrots, and a squat planter of geraniums, as if Mama Triceratops had just returned from Homebase by way of the greengrocers.
But my daughter doesn’t care. She’s probably extracted as much value from those toys as from her genuine Duplo bricks.
After all, childhood play is the world of make-believe, where everything can be lovely, Power Rangers can unite with Avengers, and dinosaurs always eat their vegetables.
